Gravee: Get Your Context Indexed, Share Ad Revenue

There's a new search engine in town. Gravee, at http://www.gravee.com/, offers to share ad revenue with content owners who allow their content to be indexed. Initially I thought this was a cool idea but the more I think about it the more worried I get.

Actually Gravee is not a stand alone engine; it's a metasearch. In addition to metasearching, Gravee's how it works page says, "Gravee applies its own proprietary relevancy algorithm on top of that to further refine the results, providing you with what we believe is the best search experience on the Web."

Now to the revenue sharing part. The same page says, "With Gravee's AdShare program, when a user clicks an ad on Gravee, up to 70% of the ad revenue generated as a result is divided between the 10 sites included in the natural search results on the page (i.e. 70%/10 = 7% of ad revenue to each Web site on the page - for every ad that is clicked). Register your site now to start collecting your share of Gravee's ad revenue"

Okay, so we already have problems with spam sites trying to get to the top of search results because they want you to click on their page and buy their mess. Now we have an incentive for them to get to the top search results so you'll click on their page and buy their mess AND they'll get a cut of search engine ad revenue? Eeek. I went to the registration page and looked through their terms of agreement, but didn't see much through the haze of legalese that made me feel better, though apparently participating sites have to agree to adhere to the CAN-SPAM guidelines.

I ran a few searches, for generic words and proper nouns. For the most part the searches were okay. Results included where the results ranked on the other search engines searched, as well as the title, page snippet, and URL. There were not other page information elements provided -- size, link to a cache, etc. The relevance was for the searches I did pretty good.

I don't know; the whole thing made me a little uneasy. One the one hand, it's a noble idea: share the revenue generated by running a search engine with the content publishers that make it possible for you to aggregate a search index in the first place. And if it were 1995 instead of 2005 you could go from there with no problem. But there is so much spam and so much trickery involved in page rankings nowadays that I'm worried that this is giving certain kinds of Web site managers the absolute wrong incentive.

I also disagree about a couple of assertions on the site. From Why Gravee Is Better: "...today's search engines are great at evaluating events and long-standing content that have already reverberated throughout the Web, but not so good at evaluating relevancy of content (or any web site, really) that is relatively new, but lacks a high concentration of links pointing to it (or other "historical" measures). Simply put, today's search engines overvalue the past and undervalue the future because their algorithms are unable to predict the relevancy of new content the way that people can. We believe there is a better algorithm. An algorithm that takes inputs from humans and machines (including other search engines) rather than solely from its own closed, proprietary algorithm for determining the relevancy of a search result."

There's only so far I can address this because there's only so much information about its algo that Google will let escape. But I'm reasonably sure that one of the things Google uses is how other people link to a site to come up with how high they rank a site. Why are the actions of a set of humans, as reflected in an algorithm, worse than what Gravee is calling "inputs from humans and machines"?

While I don't agree with everything said at http://www.gravee.com/whybetter, I liked the manifestoesque statements on the page. Which made the how it works page more disappointing. Yes, the commercial aspect is nice and the prospect of making money is nice and la la la. But I want to know how it works. What are you going to do about spam sites? How much human vetting of registering sites is done? How do people buy ads on the site in the first place? What are you going to do with sites that violate your terms of service? I can think of lots more questions to fill out their currently-two-question FAQ, at http://www.gravee.com/faq.

I like the idea and I like what I think is the sentiment behind the idea. (If I didn't I'd write up something else.) I'm just concerned that this is going to be real tough to do, and I'm not reassured by what I (currently) see on their site. But it's early.

Posted to Search Engines | TrackBack