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Flying to the moon with Volunia

Is the concept of web searching about to be revolutionised with Volunia, the new social search engine made in Italy?

What is Volunia?

Launched on Monday 6 February 2012 at the University of Padua, where the Italian physicist Galileo Galilei founded modern science, Volunia claims to be a next generation search engine that will revolutionise the concept of web searching.

Volunia was developed in Italy by the Italian mathematician and Professor of Computer Science Massimo Marchiori as a search engine and social network combined together. It is currently available in beta mode and being tested by 100,000 users.

Volunia is eventually expected to open to all and will be offered in 12 languages, including Chinese, Japanese and Arabic. It will also be accessible on tablets and other mobile devices.

The search engine’s headquarters are located in Padua and funding is being supplied by Mariano Pireddu, a Sardinian entrepreneur with 20 years of experience in the field of IT and telecommunication.

Volunia, which currently has a U.S. copyright, does not aim to be an anti-Google search engine.

“It would be a folly trying to challenge a giant,” says Marchiori. “Volunia is something complementary.”

Volunia was officially launched on 6 February 2012 at the University of Padua, Italy

What does the name Volunia mean?

The name Volunia is derived from two Italian words:  “Volo”, flying, and “Luna”, moon.

“We liked the idea of using an Italian name,” said Marchiori. “My American friends find that it has a very voluptuous Italian sound. We must be proud of our language.”

To explain the concept behind the search engine, Marchiori uses the metaphor of chickens that are freed from their cages: “The year 2012 is a revolutionary year for chickens. On January 1st, the European Union passed a law forbidding to keep chickens in battery cages. Existing cages must be enlarged to give chickens enough room to spread their wings and walk about. This law, originally proposed in 1999, when Google was just about to take off, has now been approved, and coincides with the birth of our tool which gives us the chickens of the web more freedom to fly.”

Who is Massimo Marchiori?

Massimo Marchiori is an Italian mathematician and professor of Computer Science at the University of Padua.

He has been working on the new search engine for the past four years with a team of former students, after giving up a high profile career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States to return to his native Italy.

Marchiori is also known as the founder in the late 1990s of HyperSearch, the algorithm precursor to Google’s PageRank. His seminal paper “The Quest for Correct Information on the Web: Hyper Search Engines” inspired two Stanford students Larry Page and Sergey Brin to create Google. “I gave my idea to Larry Page for free, but I don’t have any regrets,” Marchiori commented.

How does Volunia work?

The first part of a search query in Volunia works exactly like in major search engines. Typing “Nasa” in the search bar will yield a list of links about the US space agency.

Volunia’s main characteristic is that, next to these search results, it also displays a horizontal menu which works like an advanced toolbar to help users to further deepen their search into any chosen link.

“We call our users Power Users because they can personalise the types of “Voli” (flights), in order to make all kinds of search queries possible, “said Marchiori, who believes that personalisation will be the main feature of future search engines.

By providing a multimedia search filter, Volunia allows users to navigate through the multilayered content of complex websites. This enables users to quickly locate text, audio and video files.

To the common forms of search interaction - informational (seeking information about a topic), transactional (shopping, downloading), and navigational (search for a specific URL) - Volunia adds a spatial dimension, by giving depth to the search experience and allowing users to explore a site as if it were a geographical map.

Main characteristics:

- users are shown site map previews instead of page previews

- Volunia works with an integrated multimedia search function within a site instead of separate navigation tools for images or videos

- users can see how many people are browsing (or have browsed) the site they are visiting and interact with them in real time

- users can see and access the social networks associated to each website

- by aggregating users’ reviews of websites – positive as well as negative – Volunia is able to reorganise and rank search results

Massimo Marchiori presents the new social search engine Volunia to the press

What makes Volunia different from other search engines?

Volunia uses a different approach from major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing or Ask by enhancing the scope and the depth of the search experience. Before the advent of social media, search engines had the monopoly of web searching. Volunia’s novelty lies in the fact that it combines the two functions of searching and social networking.

“It is no longer Web 2.0 versus Service 1.0. Volunia lets users communicate”, said Marchiori.

Volunia drops the barrier between the two spaces of Seek and Meet, which are “integrated like Ying and Yang.”  In fact Seek and Meet is the motto of this Italian engine, whose logo also emphasises this double mission.

While the aspect of Seek and Meet recalls Google’s now closed Sidewiki to some extent, now users can interact in real time, turning the web into a living space.

Does Volunia offer a more intelligent way to gather information?

Information gathering in Internet is a complex activity. Volunia involves a different type of interactive process and relies on a different perception of online interaction. It empowers its users to become active and interact with other users. By sharing their knowledge and various levels of expertise on topics, users are encouraged to work together and in a more intensive manner. The social dimension offered by Volunia can lead to a successful information gathering experience in real time.

“Volunia is not yet the semantic engine I wanted, nor the Holy Grail I dreamt”, says Marchiori, “but it has semantic features that enable users to find, share, combine and reorganise information more easily.”

“At the moment an engine like Volunia is as close to a semantic search engine as possible,” Marchiori adds. “This is thanks to the help of users, who can read and interpret the information, as well as understand and respond to human requests. The semantic search engine as a totally autonomous system, accomplishing tasks without human direction, has not emerged yet.”

What are Volunia’s weaknesses?

Volunia is still a work in progress.

So far, Volunia has only indexed about 1 million websites and many websites are still missing from the search results.  By comparison, Google indexes over 1 trillion sites.

A very critical aspect about Volunia is that it may raise thorny privacy issues. Although power users can decide how much information they want to reveal about themselves, they run a plausible risk to meet unsafe visitors.

[Note from the writer: After my first attempt at contacting other Volunia users through its social network capability, I discovered two strange messages in my Volunia mailbox inviting me to join a porn site. ]

There is reason to believe however that Marchiori will be sensitive to this issue, since he is also the man who in 2002 worked on P3P, a privacy protocol designed to give users more control over their personal information while browsing.

What next?

The Volunia computer lab team said it will use the feedback from beta users to enhance the service, optimise the search engine and improve the user interface in order to simplify the human-machine interaction and make the search engine efficient and enjoyable to operate.

In the meantime, Marchiori says he is receiving many advertising requests.

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Find out more:

Volunia offers a series of web tutorials on its YouTube channel

Tags: italy, massimo marchiori, next generation, padua, ranking, search engine, seek and meet, semantic search engine, social network, volunia,

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