Volunia

History

The name Volunia stems from the words "volo" (flight) and "luna" (moon), because – as Marchiori said – he wanted to evoke the quantum leap his social search engine was trying to deliver. The Volunia project was entirely developed in Italy: the head office was located in Padua, the servers were located in Sardinia and hosted by Tiscali, and the whole team, formed by 14 people, was Italian.

The project

Volunia differed from normal search engines in that, while it crawled the web and indexed websites, it built the ranking using the comments and opinions of other users. The Volunia service allowed people to interact with each other in every page they visit, as well as with the web sites' owners. Volunia used a system similar to Sidewiki. Volunia also introduced for the first time a "fly-over" map visualization for every web site, where every web site was turned into a city metaphor, also representing social information. According to Marchiori, Volunia was not meant to be a competitor to the existing search engines, staying on an alternative level. Despite what Marchiori had said, some people in the internet community considered Volunia a challenge and a potential competitor for Google.

References

References

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13. Sean Carlos. (2012-02-07). "Volunia, A Social Search Engine, Says The Web Has Come Alive". Search Engine Land.
14. Miranda Miller. (2012-03-14). "When Will Social Search Engine Volunia Deliver its Quantum Leap?". Search Engine Watch.
15. Roberto Bonzio. "Google "Inspirator" launches his challenge in Web Searching with volunia.com". Forbes.