''Volunia'' was a
web search engine
A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...
(or
social search engine
Social search is a behavior of retrieving and searching on a social searching engine that mainly searches user-generated content such as news, videos and image search, images related search queries on social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, ...
)
created by
Massimo Marchiori
Massimo Marchiori (Padua, 1970) is an Italian people, Italian mathematician and computer scientist.
Biography
In July, 2004, he was awarded the TR35 prize by Technology Review (the best 35 researchers in the world under the age of 35).
He is P ...
.
It was launched in beta only for registered ''power users'' on February 6, 2012 and went live on June 14, 2012. Volunia, dubbed as "the search engine of the future",
was speculated to be based on
Hyper Search
Hyper Search is a method of link analysis for search engines. It was created by Italian researcher Massimo Marchiori.
Bibliography
* Massimo Marchiori"The Quest for Correct Information on the Web: Hyper Search Engines" ''Proceedings of the Sixth ...
technology. On June 8, 2012, Marchiori announced with an open letter
that he had been excluded from his project:
six days later, on June 14, 2012, the site went live, but it ceased to operate in February 2014.
History
The name ''Volunia'' stems from the words "volo" (flight) and "luna" (moon), because – as Marchiori said – he wanted to evoke the ''quantum leap'' his social search engine was trying to deliver.
The Volunia project was entirely developed in Italy: the head office was located in
Padua
Padua ( ) is a city and ''comune'' (municipality) in Veneto, northern Italy, and the capital of the province of Padua. The city lies on the banks of the river Bacchiglione, west of Venice and southeast of Vicenza, and has a population of 20 ...
, the servers were located in
Sardinia
Sardinia ( ; ; ) is the Mediterranean islands#By area, second-largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, after Sicily, and one of the Regions of Italy, twenty regions of Italy. It is located west of the Italian Peninsula, north of Tunisia an ...
and hosted by
Tiscali
Tessellis S.p.A. (formerly Tiscali S.p.A.) is an Italian telecommunications company founded in 1998 and based in Cagliari, Sardinia, that provides Internet and telecommunications services in Italy, and, previously had operations in other Eur ...
,
and the whole team, formed by 14 people, was Italian.
The project
Volunia differed from normal search engines in that, while it
crawled the web and
indexed websites, it built the
ranking
A ranking is a relationship between a set of items, often recorded in a list, such that, for any two items, the first is either "ranked higher than", "ranked lower than", or "ranked equal to" the second. In mathematics, this is known as a weak ...
using the comments and opinions of other users.
The Volunia service allowed people to interact with each other in every page they visit, as well as with the web sites' owners. Volunia used a system similar to
Sidewiki. Volunia also introduced for the first time a "fly-over"
map
A map is a symbolic depiction of interrelationships, commonly spatial, between things within a space. A map may be annotated with text and graphics. Like any graphic, a map may be fixed to paper or other durable media, or may be displayed on ...
visualization for every web site, where every web site was turned into a city metaphor, also representing social information.
According to Marchiori, Volunia was not meant to be a competitor to the existing search engines, staying on an alternative level.
Despite what Marchiori had said, some people in the internet community considered Volunia a challenge and a potential competitor for Google.
References
{{Web search engines
Defunct internet search engines