The latest upstart to, er …. start, is Attendi, a search engine that differentiates from other search engines by enabling visitors to search and communicate with others online at the same time and learn about the search topic from attendees who are online. Attendi likes to call this “a living breathing search engine”.

Basically, you enter a search query and get a set of results paired with someone who can answer your questions in real time (unless they are offline naturally, in which case they are labeled “offline”). In order to use this you have to be a registered user. The whole thing is actually a chat session and looks something like this for the query “halo 3″:

The concept is interesting, but would I use this kind of search instead of standard search … well, I am not sure. Maybe when researching something more complex, when a single search result simply won’t cut it, Attendi might be useful because chatting with someone (or seeing a chat session relevant to my query) who is well on top of my search topic can give me bits of information and resources that I would otherwise be searching for for hours using standard search.

The site is still in beta so you have to leave your email address to get an invitation from the team to be able to register. There is limited content since the project just started but the authors promise more content soon. Their goal is “millions of Attendi’s storing billions of insights”, and since there seems to be a patent pending, maybe they are actually serious about this goal. If it ever gets to that, a social network powered search with all the social network features comes to mind as the next evolution step for Attendi. Something like Facebook with the primary purpose of friend assisted web search.

Share This