synopse – different Web Search
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Project Description
The initial work of Synopse was developed by Christoph Burgdorfer, the Managing Director and Partner of co&co (UK) as part of a research project of the Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication/University of Sussex.
The approach was to take a different look at web search. Google is concentrating a lot of power in today’s search market. Synopse however only understands itself as a provider of a platform. The content has to be created, linked and managed in a distributed manner by humans. Similar to Wikipedia every consumer can also be a creator of content.
This allows the distribution and democratisation of the knowledge and hence the power.
Synopse’s “clever algorithms” are not the mechanisms retrieving search results and finding relevant content. The “clever algorithms” are hidden in the background trying to identify spammers and faulty content.
And here is how it works: Users install a plugin to their browsers allowing them to manually “tag” every single website they visit with keywords. These keywords get saved in a database along with the URL they’ve visited. On the search engine on http:/www.synopse.net, people can then enter keywords to find the content again.
This project is currently in beta and under constant development.
