New Comm Biz

Search, Aggregation and Minimalistic Design

I’ve been a fan of Hacker WatrCoolr since last year (you can follow the updates on Twitter). Besides Google Reader this is my main starting point each morning. What I like about it is that it’s a meta-aggregator. WatrCoolr is a more main stream version implementation of this uber aggregator approach.

I never knew who was behind the WatrCoolr pages. The only clue was a reference (it’s no longer there) at the bottom of the sites called I’ve Got a Fang. I’ve Got a Fang is an active database of parked domains. It currently tracks almost 45 Million parked domains.

It turns out that the WatrCooler pages and the I’ve Got a Fang were created by Gabriel Weinberg, an MIT grad. Gabriel previously started The Name Database which was acquired in 2006 by United Online.

Back in March I commented on a search engine linked to from WatrCoolr called Duck Duck Go, another project Gabriel was working on. DDG takes the opposite approach of all the big players. Instead of trying to index everything on a topic, DDG just offers you a page of, what it claims are, more relevant results. Part of the reason for this claim of relevance is that DDG leaves out millions of parked domains that serve no real purpose except to run advertising, like AdSense. (Remember the I’ve Got a Fang database?)

With the official launch of DDG site they also integrated the search field into both WatrCoolr Web pages. ReadWriteWeb recently covered DDG giving it a favorable review.

There are two things that strike me about both of these applications:

1. The completely minimalistic design approach.
2. I think Gabriel was scratching an itch.

Minimalistic Design

Minimalism is obviously a huge trend in design but Gabriel takes this to another level.

The WatrCoolr sites offer only one news article at a time. You then choose whether to navigate to the next result from the same source or move to a new source. All navigation is done by either using the arrow keys *hot keys*

• J – for next result/same news source
• L – for next news source
• N – to open the article in a new tab
• R – to read it in the existing window

With Duck Duck Go you get fewer results and a box they call Zero-Click Info. This seems to usually be information pulled from Wikipedia on your search term. To truly experience DDG follow this search for Twitter on Duck Duck Go then Twitter on Google. I’m not going to do a full review of DDG now, I’m going to save that for another post. I’m fascinated by the rise in alt search engines. Besides Duck Duck Go I think I’m going to review several of these and how I use them in a series of posts. Maybe to make things interesting I’ll stick to only alt search for a while.

Scratching an Itch

It’s interesting to note that Gabriel started his last company, The Name Database, as way to track his own friend. He was building something he found personally useful. I’m sure the WatrCoolr pages are another example of something that Gabriel built out of a personal need. The WatrCoolr pages are not a business (at least not yet).

I’m guessing that DDG was built out of the original irritation that drove him to build I’ve Got a Fang. Parked domains are a huge irritation to Web developers and there is very little anyone can do about them.  That desire to weed out parked domains (aka irrelevant pages) from searches is an obviously a big driver behind DDG.

What do you think? Is this too minimal? Is this a better search solution or just a different one?

What’s your problem?

I recently encourage everyone to quit whinning and start innovating. Gabriel gives us a perfect example of how to start that process. Gabriel builds things that fix a problem he has. He then scales those out to fix our versions of that same problem.

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