Zakta is a search engine which is human powered and social. This means that you can find information that has been checked for quality by real people. You can also personalize, share and discover information you find when you search the web with Zakta.

Sundar Kadayam, Founder and CEO of Zakta, explains that he created Zakta to help solve the problem with deeper searches for information from the Web.

Organized search results

- Zakta was built to solve the informational search problem in layers, explains Kadayam. One benefit is organized search results. Zakta automatically presents results in logical categories: web sites, books, reference materials and subcategories relevant to the user’s query. Zakta also suggests semantically related topics and subtopics to search.

Kadayam was co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Intelliseek in 1997, which created such public search tools and search engines like BullsEye Pro, InvisibleWeb.com, ProFusion.com and BlogPulse.com

After a long ten-year journey through the dotcom boom, the dotcom crash, and the Web 2.0 resurgence, Intelliseek was sold to Nielsen in 2006. Kadayam left Nielsen in 2007 and returned to his passion: search engines. He created Zakta with an aim to be a complete solution to the issue with informational searches on the Web.

What issue would that be?

Most search engines are good at finding facts, but once you search for more general information, you run into problems. The Big 3 — Google, Yahoo and Bing, present you with the standard list of ten links accompanied by excerpts. As mentioned, Zakata presents search results organized in relevant categories to help you make sense of the information. But there is more.

Editable search results

Zakta’s search results are editable. They are under your control. You can delete results that aren’t relevant. You can also easily drag-and-drop results to rearrange them, or add tags and annotations to any result.

- Chances are, you are not the only one who is frustrated by how hard it is to find quality information on your favorite topics, Kadayam says. That is why, once you have edited your search results into a nice guide on the topic, Zakata makes it easy to share it. If you choose to publish your guide, it will be visible in the search results and in the directory of guides.

There is also a number of ways to share guides, whether you have made it yourself or it’s a guide you have discovered on Zakata. You can share a guide by email, link to it or embed it on your blog or site. I have embedded a Zakata guide to Garbage, a band I like.

Zakta automatically saves all your searches, including the changes you have made to the search results, into your Zakta account so you will benefit from the changes whenever they search again.

Other Zakata features include:

• Tools to gather and save information from everywhere. Zakta provides tools like the Zakta ClipPad, the Zakta Plugin, and Zakta SearchPacks, to find information anywhere on the web and include it in the user’s search process.
• Easy knowledge sharing. Zakta enables users to share their results in the form of Zakta Guides, a rich, interactive social media tool.
• Trusted collaboration. Users can invite other people they trust – such as colleagues, friends, or family members – to find information together and use a Zakta Guide as a living, collaborative document.
• Topical recommendations. Zakta can help users stay informed on topics of interest through recommendations from people they trust on those topics.

Is it any good?

Success for a search engine is delivering relevant results that are easy to comprehend and navigate. Zakta has achieved this. But Zakta does not compete simply to be a decent search engine. It aims to be a social search engine, where search results are improved by the searchers.

Others have attempted to improve search results by encouraging searchers to edit or rank information, like Scour and Sproose or to make guides, like Mahalo and Squidoo. Zakta does both.

So far, the most successful ventures into human powered search are Mahalo and Squidoo. These are not search engines as such, but directories of human powered guides to web info on all kinds of subjects.

A great social powered search engine needs a critical mass of contributing users. At the moment, Zakta guides are not sufficient in number: When I search, only a minority of my queries return a Zakta guide.

But Zakta is still in Beta. In fact, it launched just two months ago. So it is too early to tell if the social aspect will be a success. However, adding, editing and sharing info on Zakta is very easy and this could prove to be a critical success factor.

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