Twitter co-founder Biz Stone rolled out a new and improved variant of Jelly, and the Q&A search engine might make the grade this time.
Stone aims to bring the human factor back into search services, and goes as far as to say that the company finally is what "he always wanted."
The social-search engine/Q&A app was first unveiled in 2014, but its adoption rate never surged. After a welcomed tweaking process and a refreshing new look, the app is out and about to change the way we google things.
The core principle of Jelly is that people are more apt at answering questions than search engines. It should be mentioned that, although the reasoning is sound, no name in the tech industry managed to make this work. To quote just a few who tried, we are looking at Answers.com, Askville (Amazon), ChaCha, Facebook Questions, Keen, Quora, Rewarder and Yahoo Answers.
There are a number of reasons why Stone is certain that Jelly can deliver more accurate results than traditional search. People will go on searching for hours daily, just to find unsatisfying results.
"Jelly gives you your time back. Enter your question, then return to your life," Stone says.
Even if the app will initially take a few minutes to return a result, the process is due for fast improvement.
Jelly makes use of a "routing algorithm" that selects who is at the receiving end of the question. This is the best way to ensure that people who answer actually know what they are talking about. As users join the network, they check in their area of expertise and/or interest. However, the expertise is not the only factor that matters in Jelly: location, responsiveness to questions and a few other criteria are also taken into account.
Admittedly, the biggest problem that human search engines face is the scale. To make sure that users have a quick and compelling experience, you need a lot of active users.
"We believe strongly that big changes are coming to the way people interact with technology," Stone mentions. Jelly does use some AI, but the main power source of the app is supposed to remain the human input.
It remains to be seen how the Q&A search engine will fare, but right now it is downloadable on iTunes or usable over the Web.
