If I were going to describe how we navigate and find sites on the Internet, I would say it has become a jungle. Trying to navigate through and around the internet to find the very best sites has become difficult, complex and sometimes darn right frustrating. The technology driving search today is complex and while it has improved our ability to find a board selection of sites and information when you or I  know specifically what we are looking for, it has also become in many ways too complex for it’s own good and often returns too many irrelevant unusable results that does not allow us to distinguish which sites are truly relevant for what we are looking.

The Problems

Text Ads
Search engines have text ads all over the results pages in hopes in generating clicks that in turn drive their revenue. I think we can agree this is a good business model and needed to allow sites to make money and stay in business. However, what is not good is that you and I can become confused and unable to tell what a “real” result is and what is a “paid result”. This causes a great deal of confusion and I might suggest sometimes these search engines want us to become confused. This can just lead us somewhere we never wanted to go and waste our time.

Online Marketing Companies Search Engine Optimizing Sites
Search results are corrupted by the hundreds of online marketing agencies out there or tricky programmers offering their services to help companies trick the spiders that crawl websites by tweaking their site coding and creating dummy sites with page links into thinking a site is the best or the most relevant when, in fact, it might be neither. This is helpful to the companies who want you to find them just to get traffic, but not helpful if what they offer is not what you are looking. Tricking us  wastes our time and causes more frustration.

Online Review Sites
The problem of search and recommendations is even further complicated by sites that rely on user’s feedback to recommend what are the best sites. The problem with this “social networking method” is that even these results are corrupted by word of mouth or viral marketing campaigns that companies launch. Companies get what are often referred to as “buzzers” to go out and write reviews about them, creating a totally biased/fake recommendation or even writing a bad review about a competitors product. Whether it’s reading a review of a book or other product on Amazon, a review of a stereo on eOpinions, reading a message board on a recommendation of a site to check out, or even a product, or any such site with recommendations, is that we generally have no idea what the person’s background giving the review is or the relationship to the product, company or item that is being reviewed. This leaves us guessing if any review is real or not which makes the whole review system itself unusable, all because of a few bad apples.

Most Search Engines are Not good at General Searchs
Search engines like Bing and Google are great if we know exactly what we are looking for, such as Dominos Pizza(s) in Baltimore, MD. But, let’s say we are looking for the best auction sites on the internet. If we type in the term “auction” into Google we get (at the time of this writing) 198,000,000 results. How in the world are we going to know which are the best auction sites?  Search engines do not recommend the “best” sites per say, they recommend the ones that are optimized the best for their spider that reads sites and then they implement their logarithm to make some sort of ranking.

My Idea to Solve the Problem
I have been studying search since the early 1990’s, actually looked super deep into it in my days as a venture capitalist. Back in the early days search was done by humans and we did a good job recommending sites to one another and building lists. Then millions of sites popped up and the big search engines could not keep up paying humans, so they build code that tried to act as humans. The one thing I have found through all the years is that I still find the best sites not by doing random searches using big search engines, but rather from talking with friends and colleagues. I find the best sites at parties when a friend says, “Hey have you checked out so and so, it’s a great site” or when I am chatting with someone on IM and they suggest checking out a site. When I am interested in a specific category type site, say I am looking for the best road bike site to check out to read about some hot new bike or something wrong with mine, I do not do a search on “best road bike site”, rather I call or IM a friend who I know is an expert in biking. Why, because I trust that person as an expert and I am sure he/she knows what site(s) to recommend because he/she does that thing all the time. Then, I get that site and I bookmark it and try to categorize and code my bookmarks so I can find the darn site again.

This leads to my idea, the Congo Jungle Experiment. I know I am an expert on fishing and fly fishing. Why? Because I fish all the time, I ran one of the first and what became the largest fishing social networking and e-commece site on the internet called WorldwideAngler.com, I currently run a social networking site called TidalFish.com which has over 56,900 registered anglers, I run Lateral Line, a technical year-round fishing clothing company and help run a fisheries conservation foundation called Marine Ventures Foundation. I fished from Alaska to Maryland and all over the world. While I may not know it all, I know a lot, at least enough to know what are the best sources of information on the internet for different types of fishing. I know I have a lot of friends, you may be reading this, who are experts in other areas as much as I am in fishing. So, the experiment is to see if I can get some friends who are experts in different areas and we will start building a search engine built by humans which we can all benefit from and trust.

The outline of how we will do it (can and probably will change as we get into it and it grows, I hope)

• Each expert/guide will be a expert in a given category.
• That expert/guidewill suggest 3-10 top sites in a given category based on his/her opinion.
• He/she will write one sentence on: the pros of the site, the cons, and general info on what the site is good or why it is good
• He/she is not allowed to put his.her own site(s) in the list, that would corrupt the results so to speak.
• Each expert/guide will provide a short paragraph describing why he/she is an expert so anyone reading the suggestions can know what the background of the person is. In the description he/she can site his/her sites so we can check those out a well should we choose.
• He/she will also provide a picture of himself or herself to put a name with a face.
• He/she will agree to take no gifts, money or like payment to place a site on the list. It’s down and dirty honest search.

We’ll see how big we can make it. As it grows it will become more of a resource for each of us and I hope it gets rid of the long list of bookmarks I have and have to try and keep organized, we’ll have created “honest search”.

If you are a friend and/or found this page somehow and want to be a part of this email me at: Brandon [at] BrandonCWhite [dot]com
I will have a taxonomy page up shortly with suggested categories.

PS I was talking with a friend and he asked why Congo Jungle, good question. The Congo basin is approximately 3.7 million square kilometers and is home to some of the largest undisturbed stands of tropical rain forest on the planet. These search results we’re putting together are undisturbed by any marketing company, search engine optimizing companies, hacked code or any other sort of corruption. I also thought it was a cool name

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