Zniff Review
by Paul Flyer
Zniff is billed as the “human search engine”. Essentially, Zniff is a search engine for the websites bookmarked via Spurl (I have reviewed Spurl elsewhere) . Websites that get bookmarked the most appear higher in the search results. The idea is that bookmarked sites are favored choices among actual users. Thus, a search of those results will produce a list of the most quality websites.
Results can be returned based on relevance or time. Searching by relevance produces results generally based on the number spurled. For example, I searched for “fishing”. The number one result is American Fly Fishing Trade Association (it had been spurled 4 times). Doing a relevance search for “dogs” providing an interesting list. A site spurled 18 times (and about all breeds of dogs) was listed second, while a site spurled once (and solely about schnauzers) was listed first. It seems the algorithm needs a little work.
Searching for “fishing” again, but by “time”, produced an article on psychics as the number one result. The top result will be the most recent one added. However, what does a psychic have to do with fishing? It could be that page got tagged that way. A weird result nonetheless.
For more complete results, Zniff can pull from the Yahoo search result set as well.
Remember, this is a limited audience of users. This search engine represents only Spurl users. Since Spurl does integrate with del.icio.us, I suspect that the full released version of Zniff may include results from that social bookmarking tool as well.
There is a Firefox Plugin for Zniff that includes it on the Firefox Search Engine drop down list.
Zniff is useful to see what others deem important. I did searches on “poverty”, “homeschool”, and “london”. All the top sites were generally useful. If anything, Zniff can be used in conjunction with traditional search engines to do research, especially if you want to know what websites other people have found to be helpful.
Be sure to review our list of recommended web tools.
