Habitually Good

Have you visited http://www.iRazoo.com? Well, I have and I won’t recommend it. It’s the latest in a line of people powered search engines (I blogged about a few sometime back). The way Razoo works is very similar to Url.com.

• You search for something and get search results which are pulled from existing search engines.
• You then visit the links from the search results and then say Yes/No for whether you like the site, you think it’s relevant, etc. (very Digg like).
• When you search next for that same phrase, you will see a recommended results section which shows the aggregates for all search result recommendation for that phrase.

Ok, so what’s new in this?

• Well, the UI is different. You can view the site and vote for it by hovering over the search result icon.
• You get points per search, per vote, per referral and you can trade-in your points for an iPod or a Camera. 2 per search or vote, and 10 for a referral.

So… what sucks?

• You are allowed to clock only 50 points by search or vote in a day. There is a 50 point limit. While I can understand why this limit is in place, it is very impractical. To get an iPod using Razoo, I need to search every day for 3,460 days (one iPod is 173,000 points); that’s about 9 years.
• I could choose to earn my points the referral way, which has no limit. Of course, it is just a matter of getting 17,300 friends to sign up to get that 30 GB iPod.
• Even though you cannot earn points beyond 50 in a day, you can still keep on recommending sites yes and no. There seems to be a potential for manipulating results (unless these guys are very effective at detecting such behavior).
• Aside from that, the search is painfully slow.

I am still waiting for a search which is worthwhile. Let’s see if something comes along.

[tag]Search[/tag], [tag]Internet[/tag]

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.