Snappy Fingers is a Bangalore based vertical search engine for Questions & Answers. It crawls and indexes FAQs across the internet, and provides search results in a easy to view Q&A format. People can use it for finding answers, or for conducting research.
If you are wondering what they are crawling- their approach is dead simple. Using the Alexa Web Search APIs, they crawling all FAQ pages they can find (irrespective of the topic). Typically FAQ pages have the word “faq” or the phrase “frequently asked questions” in either the URL, or in the Title tag, or in the body. They are not crawling typical Q&A sites like Yahoo answers, forums etc. They believe that FAQs typically provide more detailed answers to queries, so Q&A search helps in finding answers faster. This is helpful especially when one is researching a topic.
In response to my question about their Q&A ranking algorithm, I was not provided any answers on account of confidentiality. I think that factor is very important, something that could decide the utility of the service. Since FAQs are typically within the same webpage (URL) with no differentiated metrics for popularity, relevance etc, this is not an easy problem to solve. Two possibilities arise – (A) taking the popularity of the FAQ page url itself as a surrogate for its constituent questions, and (B) semantic word & pattern matching for the queried term. The extent of this problem can be quickly demonstrated. Search for “iphone” (one of the recommended terms) and you get “What is iPhone?” as the first result. Thats good! Now search for “New Delhi” and the first result is “What would be the climate of New Delhi during February, 2008?” That’s useless. I think the SnappyFingers team has to focus on this problem if they want this to go anywhere.
Nevertheless I like the idea behind the service. With the big search engines (Google, Yahoo) being what they are, I think there is ample scope for startups to try to make incremental improvements in search – even a small innovation could make them likely acquisition targets. SnappyFingers falls into that catgeory.
One feedback: I just cant fathom why the search engine is called “SnappyFingers” … looks completely ill-conceived and thoughtless to me… Its founder would do themselves (and their users) a favour by reading this terrific write-up about how to name internet products/services.