Mail.Ru opens "social search"

“Answers@Mail.Ru” is a mixture of search engine, expert system and social network. As in the search engine, users can ask questions here. The answer to them is given not by the program, but by other people, who thus earn a rating for themselves. Something similar was described in a patent that Microsoft recently registered.

The invention of Microsoft is that users help each other find the necessary information on the Internet. This whole process takes place in the form of a game. But if the Microsoft developers only patented the idea, then their Russian colleagues have already brought it to life.

The principle of the new service “Answers@Mail.Ru” is that people answer questions posed by other people. For each asked question, five points are taken from the user's account. For each answer, two are added. For voting - one point is added. When a rating of 5000 points is achieved, a person receives the title of “Sage”, and upon reaching 10,000 - “Higher Mind”. Managers Mail.Ru have already announced the promotion of the most active users, as described in the Microsoft patent. What will be the promotion - not yet reported.

In many cases, an expert approach allows you to find better information than the search engine on the Internet. For example, he gives the best result when searching for answers to such questions: “Do you think it is better to go with the girl on the first date to Pirates of the Caribbean or to a romantic comedy?”, “For you to choose $ 20,000: the new Citroen C3 or second-hand Honda CR-V ? "," How to make a puppy swallow a pill? "," Do all women like to be kissed on their necks? ", Etc. All these questions along with the answers are published in the thematic catalog, on which you can conduct a full-text search. The system constantly updates the statistics: how many questions are there in the system, how many of them are not answered.
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Who will answer all these questions? The key factor in the success of the project, according to the developers, is that Mail.Ru has a huge active audience. Now the company has 20 million active email users. If you look at another social service , Photo@Mail.Ru , over 3 million people communicate with each other there, and about 2 million communicate with each other, according to the company’s own data.

“I believe that Responsibilities @ Mail.Ru will be a breakthrough in the field of information retrieval on the Runet,” summarizes Dmitry Grishin, CEO of Mail.Ru. “Today we are opening a new chapter in the history of search engines in Russia.”