Antya (launching tomorrow, currently under wraps) is a interesting twist to the ever burgeoning entourage of search engines dotting the internet. It works like a search engine (and looks like one as well) with a couple of differences – a) it is human powered and hence does not have the mandatory crawler that all search engines use to index content and b) the search results show an ordered listing of websites and not the typical keyword search results that everyone is familiar with. Why and when would using this make sense? Well if you want to quickly skim through the various websites for a particular search term like “social networking” or “restaurants“, this could work. In fact that is what the name “Antya” signifies- it takes you to the end objective of your search query, i.e. the location, place or thing that can potentially deliver to you what you are looking for. Once the basic search results show up, you can splice through it geographically. Or jump on to a related search query that gets recommended to you on the same page (done very intuitively). Antya is the effort of two guys – Bharani & Sunny, who have considerable internet experience and were till recently working at MIH India. Antya is seed funded (as reported by VCCircle) by Vivek Pahwa, whose venture Desimartini was recently acquired by the HT group’s internet arm.
The search engine works quite well and its UI design/interactions are quite intuitive. The duo has tried to innovate with the layout for the search results using something called the Antya view, which brings up the logos of the websites (as a means of navigation) and this deserves a commendation (most search engine developers aren’t brave enough to mess around with the typical google format, which has become some kind of an industry standard).
Something that did not appeal to me was their use of user ratings as a surrogate for the ranking metric (or pagerank equivalent). Since the search engine is human powered, hence it has a human created index. You need some metric to rank the search results- employing user ratings to do this job is over-simplifying the core problem and will make search quality susceptible to spam. Also Antya is not considering blogs at this stage for its search results, which may cause them to miss out on critical search/SEO juice.
Overall Antya looks promising. Look forward to seeing its progress in the coming days..
