Emil Ismalon
Google's Israeli rival?
By harnessing power of community social behavior, Israeli start-up Collarity is looking to challenge Google in battle of search engines
"People tell me that searching with Google is pretty good. I tell them to look ahead at what search engines will look like in 15 or 20 years," says Emil Ismalon, a physicist, meditation instructor and founder of Collarity.
Founded in 2005 and with several patents registered to its name, the Israeli company, which powers Ynet's new search engine, seeks to bridge the online divide between the personal and the collective by employing the largely untapped resource of communal knowledge.
The company's vision sees the future of search engines in the relationship between the single user and the community of users – with the user benefiting from the community, which has likely searched for the same thing before him – and the user influencing the community back through his own searches.
Users can elect to filter results based only on their own history or that of any community – with every "community" originating from a unifying starting point.
Search entries are analyzed to help group "clusters" – networks of users with common interests whose results would likely be relevant to others conducting similar searches.
For instance, if a music website were to incorporate Collarity into its features, users searching for a term would receive results based on previous searches made by other members from a relevant network.
"We create collective profiles of different communities – be they serial killers, physicists or fishermen," says Ismalon. "Every individual is an unlimited source of information – the trick is bringing that information to the people who need it."
