Mechanical Zoo To Introduce Social Search Service
A 12 person staff composed of some former Google employees is working on a new social search service through their startup Mechanical Zoo.
They’ve managed to keep the development under wraps, but are expecting to release a beta sometime in the next month or two.
Details are slow to emerge from the proceedings, but we do at least have an idea of who’s working on it. Ex-Google employees Nathan Stoll, Max Ventilla, and Fritz Schneider. The team also includs old-school computer scientist Damon Horowitz.
Apparently, rather than produce a website, Mechanical Zoo is building an application that will tap into ones social realm to give information on various queries, not completely unlike Yahoo Answers, but more targeted to a personal social network.
“We’re tackling the problem of subjective search–when no one answer would satisfy everyone–and the answer is not to serve a Web page,” Ventilla said in an interview with CNET. “We’ve developed an online social structure that lets users reach out to people they already know.”
Ventilla and many others who have left Google appear to be more interested in producing services that enhance Google rather than compete with it. “It’s stupid to try to outdo Google. I can do more good outside Google than inside by doing something complementary,” added Ventilla.
Thanks to Stefanie Olsen at CNET for the story and quotes.
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