Startup Videos Review: aftervote

Review of Startup Videos Opportunity: aftervote by Marshall Kirkpatrick.

Marshall's review:

AfterVote is a web search engine that aggregates search results from the three leading search engines and provides a number of ways for users to filter those results.

You may remember the search engine Jux2.com from a few years ago. It was (is) a neat aggregation of search results from Google, Yahoo!, MSN and a couple of other big search engines. It was interesting as a proof of concept or if you were really concerned that you might miss a web page that ranked high on Yahoo! but not on Google. It sold in 2005 for $100,000 on eBay. That's not bad.

AfterVote offers the same basic service that Jux2 does with a respectable number of other features added on top. There are some good ideas here, but life is precious and you should watch out how many of its moments you spend pursuing mildly good ideas. AfterVote submitted a nearly unwatchable, two-part, 18 minute long demo video for the contest. Volume, image clarity and bad editorial decisions regarding what I needed to know were big issues. Two or three minutes of louder narration over the top of some clearer, static screenshots would have worked much better.

What it Does

Aftervote searches the big three search engines and lets you filter the results in a variety of ways. The most interesting thing the service does is that if users click through a search result and then click back to the results page (indicating that they were looking for something else) then that counts against that particular result in AfterVote. That's cool.

Users can also whitelist and blacklist domains, vote for a result as a good one and set the three search engines to weigh differently in the aggregate results.

I am mildly interested in aggregating search results across three web search engines, but I'd have a hard time trusting anyone who makes a video this poor to not mess up my search results too. Sorry, but that's what almost anyone would say if they watched this demo and were as crabby as it made me.

Search is generally something that people want to get in and out of fast, I can't think of any social search engines that I think are particularly viable. This one doesn't offer me anywhere near sufficient reason to switch search engines.

One thing that could be fun for AfterVote to try is this. Imagine they had a javascript bookmarklet titled "Try this search at AfterVote" or something like that. Users could put it in their toolbar and click it after using one of the big three search engines. The bookmarklet could parse the query out of the URL of the search results page and repeat the search in AfterVote. I'd put one of those in my toolbar and give AfterVote a couple of second chances if it was easy to do.

Here is the submitted video pitch from AfterVote: