In Search of Search Excellence

Web Surfing is broken — Vurb is trying to fix it

I was thrilled to hear about Vurb being selected as the winner of this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt NY competition. The vision articulated by Bobby Lo, Vurb’s Founder, completely resonates with my own vision of a fundamental problem with the web: “surfing” as we used to know it is broken.

The concept of web surfing was born in 1989 — exactly a quarter of a century ago — when Tim Berners-Lee first outlined the ideas that led to the initial development of HTTP and the now ubiquitous hyperlink. Three years later, when I first learned about the World Wide Web, HTTP 0.9 was less than a year old, the Mosaic browser was under development, and there were roughly 40 web servers around the world. I remember the sense of awe I felt when I realized the power of the hyperlink, and the elation I felt as I could literally surf from site to site by following these magical blue links.

Back then, virtually every web site could include a list of other web sites. For about a decade, web rings were a popular way to help people find related content by providing a list of related web sites with reciprocal connections. As the number of web sites grew, these sorts of links became unmanageable, and search engines became the norm. The Google page rank algorithm was designed to help people find the most “relevant” content for any keyword or web site. While search technology continues to improve, most would agree that the sheer amount of content on the web makes it extremely difficult to find relevant content.

Search works reasonably well when you know what you are looking for, but if you are looking to explore, or if you are searching for something specific but in an area that has a lot of information, the search experience can be overwhelming and disappointing. Have you tried using the web to get advice on a good place to go on vacation, or on choosing a present for a loved one? Or have you tried searching for a person with a common name?

Several companies and research labs are developing novel ways of making search more effective for end users. Many of these focus on trying to improve the search process itself, for instance using social search (leveraging the social graph of the person doing the search), collaborative search (combine search efforts from multiple users) and semantic search (trying to understand the user’s intent and the meaning of terms used in the search), to name a few.

Vurb is taking a different approach, focusing on how to make the search results more useful and approachable for the end user. In a nutshell, Vurb collects information relevant to the search from a variety of services and combines them into “cards” that provide the user with a coherent view of many facets of the search results. For example, someone using Vurb to look for a good place for dinner may be shown a card that includes information from Yelp, Google Maps, Foursquare and OpenTable. As the user continues to explore options, search cards are added to a stream (similar to a Facebook timeline), so the user can go back and explore multiple options.

I expect that in the next few years we will see an explosion of tools and platforms like Vurb, which aim to make search a better experience, making it easier for users to spend less time looking for relevant information and more time reading what they care about. In the meantime, kudos to Vurb for winning this prestigious competition.