Is this the little search engine that could?

Posted by Jim Stroud

February 10, 2006

There are a lot of Web 2.0 companies in perpetual beta that are getting some attention. Here is one in Alpha that seems to be lurking under the radar. Its called Tinfinger and its a searchengine powered by human beings. (Go figure…)

Just to prove that Web 2.0 is not restricted to Silicon Valley, Tinfinger is located in Australia (of all places) and is seeking a bit of capital, so VCs are welcome. If you visit the site and do a search, remember that Tinfinger is in Alpha, so not much content is there. My first mpression of Tinfinger was that DMOZ and Wikipedia got together and spawned a lovechild, but maybe that’s just me?Here are some interesting tidbits about Tinfinger and what Paul Montgomery (CEO) and Tai Tran (CTO) have to say about it.

What is Tinfinger?

Tinfinger is a human search engine.

What does that mean?

Just what it says: it is a search engine about humans. Tinfinger is for you to find Internet content about humans.

Oh, what kind of content do you store?

To start, Tinfinger will store lists of links to news articles and blog entries outside our site, and we will enable you, the user, to upload your own articles and pictures about your favourite people. We might include other kinds of content later.

So it’s like MSN, or Yahoo, or… ?

It is like them, yes, but there are some significant differences. You can perform a text search on our data by typing words into our search box, like you can at Google or Yahoo or any other search engine. However, our site is not just about search.

What is it about, then?

Individual humans are classified at Tinfinger into categories, like how books are classified by librarians using the Dewey system, or living things are classified by biologists using the Linnaen system. Experienced Internet users would be familiar with what Yahoo’s directory used to look like and what the Open Directory Project looks like now. Although we use the same basic structure as those directories, the focus of our directory is people, not topics.

Big deal! What’s the difference?

Other search engines require you to type in “keywords” into their search box to give you a list of results. Our directory structure focuses on names. Because people are classified into categories in our database which could also double as keywords in other search engines, you will get some of the same effects in a Tinfinger search as a keyword search on other sites, but we hope that our categories contain better-targeted, fresher content.

What’s on a Tinfinger news page?

The basic layout of a category news page is simply a listing of news stories, and will be familiar to users of Google News, Topix.net, Blogniscient or Memeorandum - particularly the last of those four. The headline and a small snippet of text from each story is listed down the page. On our site, each of those stories is associated with a different person who falls within that category. The subject’s name is highlighted in the news snippet with a link to his or her Tinfinger profile page. Below the news snippet, there is a list of recent news articles and blog entries which also mention that person, ranked by relevance and timeliness.

So each person is mentioned in just one category?

Each person is classified into one primary category, yes. However, each category page lists the most popular stories not only about people classified into that category, but also all subcategories below that category. So the Sports category can contain stories about people in the Sports/Golf category, the Sports/Olympic/Winter/Skiing/Slalom category, and the Sports/Football/Australian Rules/AFL/Players category. Also, some people are added to multiple secondary categories to represent different roles they play.

But what if I don’t want to bother with all this category stuff, and stick to keywords like normal search engines?

Each person (and all content associated with them) also has a number of keywords associated with them. These keywords have come to be known as “tags” at other sites. You can bypass the category system and simply search for tags in the search box at the top right of each page.

Click here to check out Tinfinger for yourself.

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