A search engine that promises to radically simplify the internet searching process has been launched.
US-based Dumbfind.com was founded in 2003 by Johns Hopkins university graduate Chris Seline and was funded by seed capital from a group of private Irish investors.
Described as a “viable and efficient alternative” to existing search engines such as Google, Dumbfind.com combines the traditional keyword search with the ability to prioritise results based on “generalised topics”. By using their intuition to identify topics, it is claimed users are able to construct much more meaningful queries.
“No one company should control the flow of information, no matter how good their intentions may be,” commented Seline. “Dumbfind brings added flexibility to search queries and the ability to harness that flexibility in an intuitive manner.”
“The ‘topic’ is the context in which a user wants to perform a particular search.” He added. “Dumbfind has already done the work in understanding that this is a relevant category for the search. Other engines cannot do that and simply work on the frequency of two words appearing alongside each other. At Dumbfind we are getting closer to how the mind thinks.”
It won’t please Seline to know, however, that when we ‘dumbfounded’ his name, his own search engine could only manage a couple of spurious references. Google, on the other hand, came up with half a dozen solid news stories — mostly, predictably enough, about the launch of Dumbfind.com.
By Brian Skelly
