Introducing Jelly, A New Search Engine
Jelly is a new kind of search engine delivering answers on demand.
Jelly is the only search engine in the world with an attitude, an opinion, and the experience of people to back it all up. Only Jelly can say you asked the wrong question. Only Jelly can give you answers you wanted but didn’t think to ask. Only Jelly will deliver a thoughtful answer to your anonymous question. This is all because Jelly is humanity plus technology.
How We Got Here
Ten years ago, the world was going mobile. A small team created a simple tool to harness this potential in a productive way. As a co-founder of Twitter, I helped build a new form of communication that amplified humanity’s ability to spread ideas, self-organize, and do amazing things. Jelly is an extension of that same thinking — amplifying humanity with software.
Technology is superior when humanity is woven into its DNA. I’m newly fond of saying, “Everyone is working on Artificial Intelligence, what about just, Intelligence?” Jelly sprung from the question, “What would search look like if it were created today?” We knew mobility and good old, human experience would be defining factors.
Your Time is Your Life
It takes seconds to enter a question into a search engine. Web search prides itself in providing hundreds of millions of potentially relevant documents in fractions of a second. Then you spend your time researching those results to come up with something that satisfies. Getting to a real answer may take a few seconds, it may take several minutes—that time adds up.
The average person likely has several if not a dozen or more ordinary questions every day. Think about the time you spend “searching” each day. Those minutes easily turn into hours. Jelly gives you your time back. Enter your question, then return to your life. In its early phase, it may take minutes for Jelly to get you an answer, but Jelly is doing the work.
Technology Plus Humanity
We confess, we’re using a bit of AI. Yes, we’ve developed a routing algorithm. Each query and every answer is freighted with metadata. But all this science is in service of getting you the right responses from the right folks. People who can help because they’ve been there, they have the experience, they have the opinion, and most importantly, they have the answers you need — and you can follow up with them too.
The People Who Power Jelly
We all have an instinct to help. If we pass a driver broken down on the road, our first thought is to help. When friction is removed between wanting to help and helping, people help — especially when it’s something they already know. Studies have shown that helping others releases the same brain chemical as winning money. Our incentive to help is wired in.
There’s no account needed to ask a question on Jelly. You are encouraged to create an account if you would like to answer questions in certain topics or otherwise engage with people on Jelly through commenting, saving good questions, sharing, and other interactive features we’ve built so far, and will continue building. Setting up an account is free and easy.
Jelly Is Officially “Out There”
Jelly has been in a “closed beta” for a while. That means people have been testing it out while we’ve been building it, finding bugs, and being very patient with us. Today, you can download on the App Store or use on the Web. We still have more to build (and possibly some quirks). It’s more important to get Jelly into the hands of people, than try to perfect it.
This release is the beginning. We believe strongly that big changes are coming to the way people interact with technology. Getting answers to questions is, and always has been, central to living our lives. Jelly takes out the middleman—results—and answers questions directly. Technology should get out of your way so you can decide how to live your life.
Biz Stone
Co-founder and CEO
Jelly Industries, Inc.
