Discover whats popular on the web right now www.Wowd.com Tuesday, - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Discover what’s popular on the web right now www.Wowd.com

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

• Where would you go to find the most popular & freshest information on the web?
• Google? Yahoo? Maybe Bing?
• This is not the problem that they solve
• Wowd is a real-time discovery & search engine, and this is exactly what it does

Old school: Reference search

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

• This covers Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc -- this is what we call reference search
• UX: Looking through documents for topics you already know about
• What’s indexed, and how it’s ranked: Links between documents drive crawlers and ranking
• The web has changed!
• There’s a new layer of information out there, conversational in nature

New school: Topics in conversations User experience starts with discovery…

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

• No longer documents, but people engaging in conversations
• Public, global, high-velocity, high-volume: REAL-TIME!
• User experience starts with discovery

Discover in real-time

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

• This is the Wowd Hot List, which shows new, popular pages in real-time
• Updates live, before your eyes, as you can see here
• Page content changes and pages are nominated by Wowd users
• Like a top-20 list for the entire web

Discover in real-time

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Discover in real-time

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Search in real-time

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

• If you want to do a deep-dive on one particular result [Halloween]
• Get real-time results from the ENTIRE web
• Scan down results, make two key points:
• All results shown are w/in a few minutes
• Results are pulled from the entire web, not a handful of target sites

Search for what’s popular...

… and share it

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

• If you want to do a deep-dive on one particular result [Photoshop tutorials]
• Get popular results from the ENTIRE web
• Key point about results:
• Ranked according to popularity to real people (readers, not publishers)

How does this work? Hint: It requires no crawlers and no servers & puts users in control

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

A distributed cloud architecture

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

• People download the Wowd browser application
• Makes a distributed cloud -- fantastically scalable
• 100s of M of computers, trillions of data items
• Like Skype for discovery and search
• Like BitTorrent in that the more people that join, the faster it gets

Visiting a public page nominates it

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

• Visiting a public page nominates that page for indexing
• No content from user’s machine shared, no trace of behavior in the cloud

Indexing done by another computer

The cloud indexes public pages

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

• Not your Dad’s P2P network
• Not for sharing information from your own computer
• It’s a system for nominating and indexing publicly available pages

The index is stored in the cloud

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

• Data is stored distributed around the network: no centralized database
• So what does this achieve?
• A democracy of readers, voting for pages (not a democracy of publishers)
• How the hell can we, a startup, do this? The power of many.
• Scales to millions of people and trillions of web pages -- attention data, not link data

Links are the fossil record of the web

• - John Battelle

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

• We couldn’t agree more
• It’s about human attention, not page linking

• Get results popular with real people
• Find the freshest pages across the entire web
• Hot topics you wouldn’t think to search for

The best way to engage the real-time web

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

• These capabilities come from our core principles
• Discovery is central to UX
• True ranking over historical and recent data, from the whole web
• Ranking based on popularity to real people

Web 2.0 Summit Preview www.Wowd.com Launching Public Beta, Today!

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

• Check out the Hot List and search results today
• They reflect the Web 2.0 crowd’s interests!

Tuesday, October 20, 2009