SnappyFingers… search engine for Q & A

Snappy Fingers is a Bangalore based vertical search engine for Questions & Answers. It crawls and indexes FAQs across the internet, and provides search results in a easy to view Q&A format. People can use it for finding answers, or for conducting research.

If you are wondering what they are crawling- their approach is dead simple. Using the Alexa Web Search APIs, they crawling all FAQ pages they can find (irrespective of the topic). Typically FAQ pages have the word “faq” or the phrase “frequently asked questions” in either the URL, or in the Title tag, or in the body. They are not crawling typical Q&A sites like Yahoo answers, forums etc. They believe that FAQs typically provide more detailed answers to queries, so Q&A search helps in finding answers faster. This is helpful especially when one is researching a topic.

In response to my question about their Q&A ranking algorithm, I was not provided any answers on account of confidentiality. I think that factor is very important, something that could decide the utility of the service. Since FAQs are typically within the same webpage (URL) with no differentiated metrics for popularity, relevance etc, this is not an easy problem to solve. Two possibilities arise – (A) taking the popularity of the FAQ page url itself as a surrogate for its constituent questions, and (B) semantic word & pattern matching for the queried term. The extent of this problem can be quickly demonstrated. Search for “iphone” (one of the recommended terms) and you get “What is iPhone?” as the first result. Thats good! Now search for “New Delhi” and the first result is “What would be the climate of New Delhi during February, 2008?” That’s useless. I think the SnappyFingers team has to focus on this problem if they want this to go anywhere.

Nevertheless I like the idea behind the service. With the big search engines (Google, Yahoo) being what they are, I think there is ample scope for startups to try to make incremental improvements in search – even a small innovation could make them likely acquisition targets. SnappyFingers falls into that catgeory.

One feedback:
I just cant fathom why the search engine is called “SnappyFingers” … looks completely ill-conceived and thoughtless to me… Its founder would do themselves (and their users) a favour by reading this terrific write-up about how to name internet products/services.

11 thoughts on “SnappyFingers… search engine for Q & A

  1. Anupam

    Interesting initiative!

    Just to find why its named what its named, tried giving ‘snappyfingers’ in the snappyfingers search box and got:

    Your search “snappyfingers” did not match any questions and answers.

    This may happen as SnappyFingers is a Beta product, and it has yet to completely index all the questions in the world. Maybe you can try searching again.

    A good service all the same which will improve over time 🙂

    Reply
  2. Manas

    What’s in a name?

    I keep coming across this thing about good name – bad name. While I don’t deny that names can be favourable or unfavourable. But somehow I don’t believe in the guidelines that people keep putting in.

    After all wikipedia is a very successful name even though it is hard to pronounce, easy to mis-spell and difficult to type.

    The point is that names are important but there is a limit to which we should bother about “guidelines”.

    Reply
  3. RD

    My 2 cents :

    A name of a website is just as good as it is marketed. A “wikipedia.org” if marketed well becomes very easy to type and remember, whereas a “cool.com” can easily be forgotten.

    But the concept did seem interesting to me.

    Reply
  4. Manas

    And how about del.icio.us 🙂

    I still can’t type it easily even though I have been using it for so many years 🙂 🙂

    Reply
  5. Amit Ranjan Post author

    well, I believe that names do matter… it has importance for usability, SEO, relevance etc..

    It also has a huge relevance in trems of branding and marketing, which starts mattering if you make it big…

    Reply

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