If you’re interested in search and ad-based business models, check out Gravee. I heard about it on Alec Saunder’s blog, where he summarizes some of the presenters at the most recent DEMO conference. Alec sez:

Gravee is a search engine / and advertising model. It’s kind of like Google with tags, and a reputation system plus a better business model. You claim your site, for instance, and get paid when people access it via a Gravee search. I’ll be signing up.

Gravee sez:

Our TagScore system takes inputs from humans and machines (including other search engines), rather than solely from only one closed, proprietary algorithm for determining the relevancy of a particular search result. An algorithm like Gravee’s TagScore system, that takes inputs from humans as well as machines, can better keep up with the lightning speed at which content is being generated on the Web today. A more collaborative, contributory, and open approach can better serve the needs of both searchers and content owners alike.

I sez: (1) Innovative biz model. (2) Biz model is a magnet for spam / gaming. (3) This is metasearch… they get around the heavy lifting of crawling and indexing the web by using other engines. (4) I’m skeptical of “annotate the web” schemes. There are an awful lot of pages out there, and far fewer end users, so annotations will be sparse until you reach critical mass of participating users. Also, you need several annotations from different users for a given page before you can say anything assertively about the page’s relevance. (5) Privacy fears may hinder adoption… you have to be logged in to provide relevance feedback.

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