The web is an amazing resource with so much information at the touch of a button. But so much of it is rubbish and completely irrelevant. What if we could make search more relevant to the user by harnessing the power of the system itself? I’m not talking about recording your search history or your demographics. It’s more about who you are. You act as the filter and create a world that is relevant to you. It’s early days yet but the folks at VortexDNA have made a start.

A Cyberspace For You?
Tuesday, 1 May 2007, 10:40 am
Press Release: VortexDNA

A Cyberspace For You?

NZ Tech start up seeks volunteers to test an innovative Web hypothesis

Technology start-up VortexDNA is asking for volunteers to test the hypothesis that there is not just one Web.

Embedded within cyberspace, the organisation claims, there could be hundreds or even thousands of different web-worlds, each relevant to a group of people who share a similar outlook on life.

“This could lead to a profound change in the way we think about cyberspace and create a better web experience for everyone, “comments Christchurch-based VortexDNA director Branton Kenton-Dau.

Called the ‘MyWeb’ hypothesis, the idea of thousands of web-worlds embedded in cyberspace is now being tested.

“Just as Newton passed sunlight through a prism to discover the entire spectrum of colour, VortexDNA wants to pass Google search results through a prism of your ‘DNA’ to see if your purpose, values and life focus provide you with a better search result,” explains Kenton-Dau.

Internet legend Vint Cerf, currently Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, said recently that there was still a problem finding relevant information on the Web. “My guess is that the next step in search will require making things more relevant, which may require things like the semantic web that Tim Berners-Lee has been working on,” he said.

“Making things more relevant is exactly what the My Web hypothesis is all about,” says Kenton-Dau. “Our aim is to prove that there’s a direct correlation between the web sites that interest you and the most profound definition of who you are.”
Downloading the MyWebDNA plug-in to the Firefox browser is easy, and no effort is required to use it—simply search as normal. Once installed, the plug-in circles the Google search results that are most relevant to the searcher.

The VortexDNA team says it already has statistically significant results and is now engaging with experts to review the findings before making them public.

“The experts can tell us if our math is right, but what we really want is users to tell us if we’re making a difference,” points out Raf Manji, Kenton-Dau’s collaborator. “The purpose of VortexDNA is to transform your experience of the web. The true test of our hypothesis is when you download the plug-in.”

The technology is completely anonymous, and VortexDNA doesn’t track the user’s search history in any way. They take the privacy issue very seriously.

Should the VortexDNA team succeed in discovering hundreds, or even thousands of web-worlds, the web experience will become more relevant for everyone—better news content, job hunts, dating partners, recipes, vacation ideas… the content of the Web could become ordered around an individual.

“We believe that until now the Web has been like a radio without the ability to tune into the different stations.” says Nick Gerritsen, another member of the VortexDNA team. “That means our experience of cyberspace to date has been mostly noise.” To demonstrate what they mean, the team have created a movie that can be viewed from the VortexDNA website: http://vortexdna.com/content/vortexdna-video.html.

Gerritsen, Manji and Kenton-Dau hope that the VortexDNA technology will provide the tuning knob to the radio—enabling people to find the Web content that is aligned with who they are. At present the technology is capable of identifying 78,125 different DNA types. “It’s a hypothesis,” says Manji, “that may just be web history in the making.”

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