Danville, California-based Internet search engine site Sproose today announced that it has indexed over two billion web pages, according to a press release by company CEO and founder Bob Pack, who is a former executive from Internet Service Provider Netzero. Pack helped to raise Netzero’s initial funding in 1998.

Sproose, which operates its data center in downtown Seattle, Washington, launched the Sproose search engine site on June 4, 2007. This new entry in the search engine world allows site visitors to vote on their favorite web pages, in what the company calls “human popularity voting,” and aims to give users control over the search engine results pages. "We have significantly enhanced the quality and depth of our search listings because it is important that our users have a great search experience and then improve upon it by using the self-voting model,” Mr. Pack noted in today’s announcement. Pack calls his new service “a consumer search engine whereby the users can influence the ranking of the index by voting on the results,” and notes that all user voting is purely web-based, without having to download any software.

Vote Results to the Top

Using a system the company also calls “user popularity voting,” the most popular web sites that have received the most votes are displayed at the top of search engine results pages, in a display “providing a total score of the voted sites and a ranking system that improves upon the algorithmic based order," according to the company’s June 4, 2007 initial launch information.

Only users who register at the company’s web site can affect the full index results; however registration is free, and requires only an e-mail address and a password. Sproose keeps a separate personal index of web sites for each registered user, allowing customers to remove search results that are not wanted from their personal index. Registers users at Sproose can also choose to leave personal comments relating to any search engine result on the web site, and may also “share their vote history with others with similar interests so you can explore the most common related web pages,” according to the new web site’s informational page. “A user may ‘opt out’ of sharing their voted site history by clicking on the opt-out check box in the registration," according to the Sproose web site. Users of the site may also choose to display the search results they have voted for, which according to Pack, “connects people in a social way to share knowledge through (search)."

More Human Powered Searching

The web site claims to be “Creating Human Powered Search,” according to its information page, a claim echoed recently by Jason Calacanis and his Mahalo search engine site. Mr. Calacanis has proclaimed Mahalo to be the web’s “First human-powered search engine,” and has touted it as working by “hand-crafting the best search results possible.” While Mahalo is based on human editors who select and write each result page, Sproose relies on traditional computer algorithms combined with user voting to rank its search results. The Sproose web sites states that “Other search engines only rank web pages based on the number of pages that link to a web page," and that their search engine users “have total control over the search listings where you can vote a page up to a higher position in the ranking." According to the company’s initial press release, a proprietary “knowledge rank” system of moderated directories is also featured at Sproose, allowing users to “effectively categorize and index sites, tailored for personal or group usage.”

Alongside all search result listings at Sproose is a “I like it” button, which when clicked allows a site visitor to vote for that particular search result page, instantly increasing that page’s popularity rating and possibly moving it to the top of the results page, depending on how many other popular search results exist for the search term.