Brad Prima is a relative newcomer to the search world but he believes his new search engine, ThreadSpool, will be able to stand toe-to-toe with the likes of Google and Bing. Why, you may ask?
The absolute coolest function of this new search engine is its ability to automatically know what type of media you need to find. No longer will you have to click through links on a side menu to switch to viewing images, blogs, news, and so forth. The search engine can actually read your mind. Yes – it utilizes telepathy, developed in association with the Institute for Paranomal Research, to know your inner thoughts as to what you need to be looking at. The future is here today – a search engine that knows you need an image, rather than a blog article or a video. The cool factor for search just went through the roof.
ThreadSpool, which launched in private beta earlier this week, is designed with the average, ordinary user in mind, but it has hidden goodies for people like us. For example:
- When you sign up for an account (which is free), you can connect all of your social networks to the search engine. It will then display for you a timeline of all your friends’ and connections’ in a new column on the front page. Bonus: you can search these networks separately from a regular web search. Social recruiting just got better!
- While it works using semantic web technology, ThreadSpool also allows the user to switch over to running basic Boolean queries. So for those of us who like to ‘geek’ around with more complex and time-consuming search strings, there is a way for us to do so.
- As its name hints, ThreadSpool also feeds you similar search results in a threaded dropdown in the results. No longer will you have to waste time actually clicking through links to find similar items – it already knows what will be most relevant related links and feeds them directly to you.
- Like Bing (and Wolfram|Alpha), ThreadSpool will provide you with instant answers to simple questions. For example, if you type in “What is the capital city of Missouri?” it will return, “Jefferson City.” But unlike other search tools, it will return questions back to you. For example, ask it “What 3 + 3?” and it will return the answer “6,” and then add, “Seriously? You had to look that up?”
Since this search engine is still in private beta, it is not available to the general public. However, we here at SourceCon were able to finagle a few private invitations, so if you want to get in and check it out, you can click on this link to get your invitation.
Says Prima, “We wanted to make a search engine that was fun for everyone – the basic user as well as the advanced web geek. We’re thrilled to have the SourceCon community check us out first and give us some honest feedback from the ‘geek’ side of things. We look forward to hearing what your community thinks of ThreadSpool.”
Of course, I hope that by now you’ve figured out this is a totally made-up company. Search engines cannot read your minds! Well, not yet at least…or can they…
Now, get back to work and source some awesome people for your companies. Happy Friday, and April Fools! 🙂