Coming from a more traditional work environment (i.e. not a startup) I’m used to dress codes, a proper HR department, quarterly financial meeting, and dealing with a task force dedicated to improving morale and happiness of employees. You could argue that once you have a group of people dedicated to making people happy the happiness boat has already sailed. In the few months that I’ve been at Pikimal I’ve noticed a genuine excitement in my co-workers. No one gathers around the water cooler complaining that the current day isn’t Friday, and people don’t hide in the bathroom or leave work early hoping to escape a trivial amount of responsibilities. Meetings often take weird turns where ideas and thoughts flow freely and everyone is eager to help another. So, where does a work environment like this stem from?

Since I started I was given little direction or parameters. I was hired to help with marketing and communicate how great Pikimal is as a decision tool. Having no strict guidance meant that success and failure were defined by my actions. Knowing I held my fate in my hands I felt personally invested. Having ownership over your work and the freedom to explore solutions and solve problems has the pleasurable side effect of enthusiasm.

It also helps that the staff has the freedom to experiment and explore ideas. We’re encouraged to venture down new avenues of innovation, and if it ends up in a dead end, hey, at least we learned something. That freedom is partly where the Pikimal Newsletter came from (which you can subscribe to this very instant).

At Pikimal we’re working on creating disruptive technology. Traditionally, the market adapts as entrepreneurs come forward. Internally we’re encouraged to act in a similar manner. One great example is onText. That’s something one of our programmers, Michael Hoffman, thought would be useful and then went on to develop after the opportunity to work in the Pikimal codebase. I’m over simplifying this, but onText wasn’t something that was in Michael’s job description, it was born out of wanting to make Pikimal a better experience. I think a lot of the work and content we produce comes from the freedom to explore a new frontier. That may also explain why our dev staff has such an untraditional and eclectic background.

Creating a solid work environment means treating employees like humans. Mistakes aren’t met with scorn, flexibility is welcome, and there’s a foundation of trust. It seems almost too simple, but just letting employees blaze their own trail seems to be working out at Pikimal.

So that’s an inside look into the HR culture (or lack thereof) of Pikimal. Questions? Comments? Leave a message in the space below and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can!

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Recent news about Facebook suggest that Google hasn’t completely cornered the search market. The social media giant is developing its own search technology to combat Google and other engines. Reports mention that Facebook search will offer typical internet search capability, as well as Facebook specific features. These include an efficient search of status updates, pictures, videos, and more. The engineering team working on the project is reportedly led by a former Google engineer.

Facebook has a great opportunity with their 800 million+ users. However, many analysts have pointed out that in order to be successful they must not simply replicate Google search. Facebook must create a new search on its own terms that incorporates well into its social community and that users like using better than Google.

Search isn’t all bad, but it could be a lot better. Facebook’s entry into the search realm, along with popular sites such as Amazon, Kayak, and Rotten Tomatoes demonstrate, that most consumers are willing to use specialized search engines in order to find specific results. With this in mind, Pikimal is hard at work building our customizable search. For many products, it’s the best technology available to help users make well-informed decisions. With the growth of specialized search, there’s still plenty of room for players in this game.

The spotlight for this post is on Soovle. It’s a visual portal of sorts that searches all of the major engines at once. We asked its creator Matt Amacker some questions about Soovle and search in general. Learn all about it below.

Screenshot of Soovle.com

What inspired you to create Soovle.com?

I and one other engineer built the original search completion or search assistance service for a large website. When we built it, I was struck by two things. The first was how amazingly efficient it was. We could handle ALL of the typing traffic of every customer using the site on a single box with response times in the sub 10ms time. Of course, these were big boxes, and it wouldn’t run on a single box because we have to have industry strength redundancy and such – but it was still impressive. The second, and more important discovery, was how perfect the data coming out of it was for shopping. Many folks, at the time I was building this, said the data would end up looking like common web search because of the volume of queries and the tendency of popular memes to bleed across tasks. Not so! The data coming out of our search completion was so far superior to general web search that it left a mark. Which got me thinking…if ours is so different from the general web, perhaps there are others that might know their verticals better too, and given the open nature of Ajax APIs, the obvious low-cost of search completion responses - Soovle was born.

And where does that name come from?

There aren’t that many domains under seven characters available and I wanted something that could sound like a verb. Google had provided the training for how to say “oo” names, so Soovle was an easy choice.

Soovle has some neat tricks (downloading a csv, dragging search results, listing of top Internet keywords), why include these?

If you know engineers – they’re thrilled by making stuff useful and figuring stuff out. I’m no different – Soovle is the result of my play, it costs very little to support, and doesn’t make any money - but its value as my online jungle-gym is enormous. Some of the more
engineer-thrilling, yet undiscovered features:

• User’s can run Soovle with their own logo – with a link to their own site.
• User’s can “search together” – simply by passing a permalink to someone else, Soovle becomes a “shared” search experience – letting you see what’s typed and opening a chat window.

The thing that caught my eye about Soovle was how visual and fun it is. Was adding a more interactive and visual element to search something you initially wanted to do?

Yup – I make new and novel interfaces for a living ( scalable too! ). I was criticized for not making it a more “efficient” UI – but the rotating engines are so fun – I can’t bring myself to make it efficient. If you get a chance – head into an Apple store and bring it up on one of their Cinema displays, switch to 15 engines and hit the “demo” link. Hah – I love it! I guess I’m a little silly for being entertained this way – but I enjoy it so much.

Is Soovle your ideal search environment? If not, could you describe what a perfect search engine would do for you?

Soovle is not my ideal for all things. Its good for what people have discovered it for – digging up search terms from expert-equivalent systems for verticals. Google’s interface is far superior for general tasks and Amazon is far superior for shopping. So what I’d like to see is something like the Soovle engine rotations, on a Google search box, that lets me use Google for general search and allows the other sites to offer up their interpretation of my intent. If their right, it’d be great if I could jump over in a frictionless way. Of course, I’m an engineer so having busy interfaces is “ok” for me – this sort of interface is not likely to win over the “general web user”.

What is your tech-background? Working on anything exciting these days?

I’m an engineer for a big website – which means I get access to AWS to build cool stuff on top of robust systems – I’m building all kinds of neat things every day. Really, I have an awesome gig. I’m playing with everything from NodeJS to fascinating mobile technologies to the possibilities offered by the Kinect. I built Peerbind.com – which enables engineers like me to explore and play with peer-to-peer interactions. I have another service I’m working on releasing that will enable even more play – and I’m pushing the boundary of what people think the web should do.

Do you see anything wrong with Internet search as it is now?

Yes – specifically in internet search – we are missing too many of the ”cognitive ease” features that could make internet search more fun. One of the things about search completion and search suggestion is that it takes advantage of the brain’s fantastic “recognition engine”. We humans are able to recognize what we mean far faster than we can verbalize ideas into a screen. For instance – say you want to buy a ”car restraint kind-of-a thingy for my dog” so I start typing my guess: “car dog” then POOF! there in the completion is “dog car seat”, ”dog car crate”, “dog car harness”. With that I can immediately recognize my intent. Another way sites could assist me, is to provide more images, our brains are hardwired to do an excellent job of recognizing the results we are after. When I search for things that can be confirmed or sorted with images – they should show up and own a large portion of the page.

How do you see search developing in the future? What sort of features would you like to see added/embraced by the community?

I see search being more personalized – search suggestions that are tailored to me, and my interests, search results that make more sense for me. When I search for DynamoDB – I’m not looking for information about it – I need the API documentation, and my search engine will know that and save me time ( it already taught me about DynamoDB a month ago, and I’m beyond that now.

On our blog, we talk a lot about search engines and the processes they use to render their results for you. We’ve mentioned the complicated nature of search engine optimization, but a recent news story caught our eye that shows just how intricate search can be.

Yesterday, Google released a list of changes to their search algorithm for the month of March. One would expect a few updates or tweeks in order to keep the system running smoothly and accurately, but you might be surprised to learn that Google made over 55 significant changes in the past month.

Autocomplete with math symbols, better scoring of news groupings, improvements to results for navigational queries, more relevant image search results, safesearch algorithm tuning, and improvements to processing for detection of site quality are just a few of the notable changes that have been made.

One thing is apparent: the formulas for search are extremely complicated and constantly evolving. The other point to take away from this is that as long as a site is putting out quality content, it should continue to rank highly through algorithm tweeks. As they say, content is king. Sites that rely on SEO tricks and an understanding of the way Google works in order to “out-maneuver” the algorithm are the ones who need to be heavily concerned about the changes being made.

We’re glad to see companies like Google taking the time to be honest about the changes they make. It mirrors our own feelings here at Pikimal where we’re open about the way we do things. That’s why the results you find on our site are based solely on the facts about the topics you’re interested in and nothing else. We’re proud of our technology and our ability to simplify decision making. We’re even prouder that we help consumers avoid marketing bias and search engine optimization to choose what’s actually the very best for them.

If you’re interested in learning more about Google algorithm changes, there’s a great history (2000 – today) available here.

With the advent of new features, such as PikiWiki, our development team has been demonstrating the vast possibilities of Pikimal as a social community. With that in mind, we talked with the designer of PikiWiki, Jason Shifflet, to see how he hopes these tools evolve.

How do you hope the PikiWiki tool is used as a part of Pikimal?

I would really love to see PikiWiki be one of many features that helps Pikimal foster a decision making and data community.  The ability to have socially-sourced subjective and objective data along with community revision control provides a foundation for what Pikimal can become.  Linking this crowd-sourcing with “big data” applications like Pikimal can provide a way for users to sift through the large expanse of valuable community driven data.  It would become an objective way to search for relevant subjective data.

Where do you see PikiWiki headed in the future?

My plans for PikiWiki are to have a revision system along with discussion boards, so that the community can really take control of what data is “being made.”  Currently, there are many social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn that allow users to share info, but what about networks that help share communities?  Communities where the users are generating data exist in sites like Wikipedia and Yelp, but most of these sites do not provide the user with an objective way to sort the data the users are generating.  It is my hope that the Pikimal engine can provide that objective sorting device, to allow users not to be overwhelmed by subjective information that is irrelevant to them at certain times in the decision making process.

With PikiWiki, we’re closer to providing such a tool. For example, users can contribute what they know about a product that goes beyond the objective facts that Pikimal collects.  This can include product line histories or background information regarding an item.  Then, through the use of Pikimal’s decision tools, users can drill down into this subjective data in order to augment their decision.  Just like Wikipedia, we hope to eventually provide a community feedback loop between contributing users and the wider Pikimal community.

We have to give kudos to our awesome development team who have been releasing incredible new features practically every week. Today, we’re proud to introduce a new way for our users to contribute more information to our Pikis–PikiWiki. This space is now available on all of our product pages in order to give users a spot to include facts or knowledge that our data might miss.

PikiWiki is not like Pikimal’s review option where we ask you for your opinions and experiences. This space is a community-driven area where users can contribute their knowledge or research about a particular product. It’s intended to complement Pikimal’s data and provide even more insight into the attributes and quality of listed items. Learn more here.

The PikiWiki feature is live now, so start contributing to your favorite Pikis! Simply click the edit button to reveal the text area. Also, please leave a comment below with any feedback surrounding this new option.

For starters, Wikipedia articles are set up in the perfect fashion for crawling search engines. They’re well organized by topic and include clear headings for all of the content within the entry. It also doesn’t hurt that many online users trust Wikipedia and purposely seek out its articles on various topics. For single word search queries on Google, no site appears more often on page one than Wikipedia, but does it always do so well?

The longer or more specific a search query is, the less likely that Wikipedia will be a top result. When searching for “golden retrievers,” Wikipedia is the first result that comes up. When searching for “golden retrievers for sale,” it’s nowhere to be found. This speaks to a huge void in the community-driven environment of the web.

We pride ourselves on developing new technology and techniques to help deliver the proper content to the right audience. Particularly, we want our users to find the information they need to make a proper decision, instead of digging through text they don’t care about. It’s difficult trying to figure out what text a majority of users prefer, though. When looking at our Car Piki, should gas mileage appear in the first sentence? What about cost? Or size? With so many variables we figured we should let the user decide what’s important to them, not us. Hence, onText.

onText is a new feature you’ll see as you browse products on Pikimal. It’s an upgrade to our usual text that caters content dynamically to the user. For instance, if you’re searching our Car Piki and you check that you want “powerful cars,” the descriptions of cars are instantly updated to include that information. This way, you’re reading about the information important to you, not what marketers want you to read. And if you don’t focus your search you’ll be seeing a product description that is cobbled together from some of the community’s popular searches. So, if it turns out that everyone on Pikimal is searching for “eco-friendly” cars, the default car descriptions will include eco-friendly information.

Some other neat things that onText does is provide stats in context. We know that the 2012 Ford Flex has 262 horsepower engine, but what does that mean? Is that a lot of horses? Not enough? Well, now the description reads,”The 2012 Ford Flex has a 262 horsepower engine, so it is quite powerful.” Instant context! It helps take a lot of guess work out of product research.

New items are being introduced to the market place all the time, but how does that impact our text and descriptions? Have no fear, since onText is always on, it’s always updated. As new products are entered into Pikimal, comparisons are instantly updated. This way you’re making decisions based on the freshest information available.

We know how hard making decisions can be. We’re doing everything in our power to put you in the driver’s seat, not a marketer. We want to arm you with all of the tools we can so that you make a decision you won’t regret. onText is just the beginning of many new developments we have in store to take back decision making. We’re working on a few additional features we’ll be able to reveal next week. In the mean time, enjoy the new descriptions and if you have any questions or feedback, let us know in the comments.

We’re gearing up to add more video content to the blog and site! Videos highlighting Pikimal the company and our site’s newest features are coming soon.

We want to know where else you’d like us to focus the lens. Maybe a weekly recap of new content at Pikimal? Or a closer look at our awesome development team? Whatever you’re interested in!

Just leave a comment below with your top video ideas. We’ll send a Piki ball to the first ten people to contribute!

To celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, and highlight this point, take a look at our drinking games Piki. It’s extremely popular because it’s one of the most extensive collections of drinking games on the Internet. Just like searching through products, users are able to focus on what’s important to them when it comes to to this abstract genre. Search by number of players, items needed, skill level, and more.

Not looking to play any drinking games? How about a board game? Or check out careers in education, charities, or our collection of other services. Pikimal is powered by technology that is flexible and intelligent which means we can offer decision choices beyond the run-of-the-mill products.

If you can think of a great idea that would benefit from the organizing power of a Piki, let us know in the comments. We love using our Piki technology in new and innovative ways to help as many people as possible!