General |
| Q: | What is Wowd? |
| A: | Wowd is a real-time search engine that helps you discover what's popular on the web right now. Wowd helps you stay "in the know." |
| Q: | How is Wowd different? |
| A: | Wowd is powered by real people. Wowd shows you a Hot List of popular pages and provides search results, all based on the human judgment of the members of the Wowd community. Wowd users who want to fully participate download and install the Wowd browser application. This allows them to anonymously nominate public web pages for inclusion in Wowd simply by visiting them. When a user discovers interesting, new content, those pages are automatically added to the Wowd index and made available for other users to find in seconds. When lots of people visit the same pages, these pages increase in popularity and can become part of the Wowd Hot List and will appear near the top of search results. |
| Q: | How does it work? |
| A: | Wowd provides innovative web discovery and search to our users. Many features of Wowd are available at our web site, and casual users can go there to see pages recommended by the Hot List and perform searches. Wowd users who want to use the full capabilities of the product download and install a small browser application on their own computer. This application connects their computer to the "Wowd Cloud," the distributed network of all the computers in the Wowd user community. Together, these computers power the Wowd search engine and index, and provide the statistical user attention data used to find and rank good web content. All personal information is kept on your own computer and is not shared with Wowd or anyone else, so you can contribute to the Wowd community while maintaining complete control of your privacy. |
| Q: | How do I get Wowd? |
| A: | Simply click the Download button on any page of the Wowd site. This will start the fast and easy download and installation process. |
| Q: | Who is Wowd? |
| A: | Wowd is a company located in Silicon Valley with offices in America and Europe. For more information see our team page. |
| Q: | How can I learn more? |
| A: | You can visit our Wowd blog or follow us on Facebook and Twitter. |
User Experience |
| Q: | What is the Wowd Hot List? |
| A: | The Wowd Hot List is a list of the web pages that are growing in popularity the fastest within the Wowd community. Our Hot List updates live before your eyes in real-time based on the aggregated anonymous web browsing statistics of our users. Note that the list is not the MOST popular pages on the web. That is dominated by the usual suspects: Facebook, YouTube, etc. The Wowd Hot List shows pages that are "surging" in popularity right now, pages that may make the "most popular" list tomorrow. Wowd users help each other discover new, interesting content via the Hot List. |
| Q: | How does Wowd Search work? |
| A: | When you initiate a search in Wowd, your local browser application reaches out to other computers in the "Wowd Cloud" to get the underlying index data that it needs, and then assembles and ranks the result set on your own computer and displays the results in your browser. No central servers (and their centralized logs) are involved, so no one knows what you searched for or even that you searched at all. Since the Wowd index only contains pages that were actually viewed by members of the Wowd community, it contains much less spam than a typical crawler-based index, so searches are performed across a higher-quality set of pages. Finally, real user attention data, collected anonymously from our community, is used to make sure the best pages show up at the top of the list. We think this is a better approach to search. If you would like to learn more about our unique approach to search based on user attention data, please see our "Attention Frontier" white paper. |
| Q: | What is the tag cloud? |
| A: | The tag cloud displays a list of "Hot Topics" for the Hot List or your search results. These hot topics are discovered by analyzing the set of pages that Wowd is currently displaying and finding the most frequently occurring common topic keywords. It is re-calculated and displayed every time you perform or refine a search. You can click on any of the keywords that you see to perform a Wowd search on that topic. This gives you a great deal of freedom to refine your existing searches or branch out in a whole new direction. It's up to you. |
| Q: | How do I refine a search? |
| A: | Wowd provides three major ways to refine your search. First, you can change the "sorting priority" of the search by selecting either "Best now" or "Best all time". "Best now" search is based how recently the items were created or discovered, showing you results based on what is going on right now. "Best all time" search shows you the best pages for your results based on the implicit "voting" of all the users in the Wowd community over time. Second, you can click on any "category tag" that you see on the result items to narrow your search to only the items in that tag category. Finally, you can click on any "domain tag" that you see to narrow your search to only items from that web site. For example, you could look for YouTube videos of Camaro cars |
| Q: | What is the My Pages tab? |
| A: | The full version of Wowd has lots of cool features. One of these is the My Pages tab, which provides you with the ability to browse through and do full-text search over your own web history. Your Wowd application remembers the public pages that you visit and creates an index on your computer's disk. This helps you easily find web pages that you have seen before, rather than trying to locate them by searching again through the entire web. My Pages also provides the ability to filter your web history results by time, for example looking only for results from a month ago. This is a handy way to quickly find interesting pages again that you visited at any point in time. And because the full version of Wowd runs as a local browser application all of your web history data is stored only on your local computer, preserving your privacy. |
| Q: | Why are search results sometimes not listed in newest-first order? |
| A: | Wowd aims to show you the best possible results for your query. Wowd does true ranking, not just filtering by key word. So, when we display search results, we try to make them as relevant as possible for you. Even if you are viewing "Best now" search results, the very newest items may not the most relevant to your search. |
Wowd Content |
| Q: | How are pages added to the Wowd index? |
| A: | New and updated web pages are added to the index as our users find them. Each time a Wowd user browses a public web page, that page is nominated for inclusion in the index. If it is a new page, one that is not already in the index, it will be added within seconds. If the page is already in the index, but has changed, the new content will be re-indexed and replace the old entry. In this way, each member of the Wowd user community is helping all of us to find the best, freshest content on the web. We believe that real people are best at finding good web pages! And because the pages are found and indexed by computers in the "Wowd Cloud" no information on your web browsing is sent to Wowd. |
| Q: | How can I get my site added to Wowd? |
| A: | Any full Wowd user can add public pages to the index simply by visiting them. However, these pages won't appear in the Hot List or searches until they have been "validated" by Wowd user traffic. The best way to get that is to attract users to your site. As Wowd users browse the pages in your site, new or changed pages will be added to the index. They will also become more and more likely to show up on the Wowd Hot List when people like them and view them frequently, and more likely to be featured near the top of results for relevant searches. |
| Q: | How does Wowd guard against spammers? |
| A: | Several aspects of the Wowd approach guard against traditional spam tactics. Wowd uses human judgment rather than crawler scripts to add pages to the index, and humans are much less likely than crawlers to be tricked into swallowing thousands of spam pages from phony "page farm" sites. Wowd also uses real-time human judgment to help rank search results. Traditional ranking relies heavily on inter-page link structure, so it can be "gamed" by web site owners. Wowd uses the anonymous browsing statistics of our users as a significant factor in search ranking, making Wowd much less susceptible to existing "search engine optimization" tricks. |
Privacy |
| Q: | What information does Wowd collect? |
| A: |
Wowd is an anonymous service. Wowd does not require our users to register or provide any other "personally identifiable information" (PII) to user our web site or download and use our software.
Users at our web site are subject to the normal web server tracking and logging. Wowd does capture the list of search queries submitted at our web site, and does use standard techniques (such as the use of browser cookies) to try to collect accurate statistics on unique visitors.
Users who install the full version of Wowd get additional privacy benefits. The distributed architecture of the Wowd search engine means that there are no central "servers" that handle search requests. Searches are executed on each user's own computer. This means that Wowd has no personal data from our users to store, use, give or sell. Your local Wowd browser application, of course, does have data about your searches and web browsing behavior, which it keeps on your local disk. The only data about your searches or browsing habits that is stored and accessed by Wowd is statistical information that is anonymously stored in aggregated form in the distributed Wowd Cloud itself.
Wowd does collect system statistics during installation of the full version, including OS and Browser type, installed Java version, and installation choices and options. These statistics are gathered to assist us in making sure Wowd works correctly on all possible platforms. Note that Wowd has no way to link these installation statistics to you personally.
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| Q: | What other information does Wowd keep on my computer? |
| A: | When you run the full Wowd browser application, your computer becomes a "node" in a vast distributed computer network along with the computers of other Wowd users. We call this network the "Wowd Cloud." Each computer contributes some disk space to the task of storing part of the search index, and the computers exchange requests to store and retrieve these data. These data are stored in the Wowd cloud and are general information about the pages in the index and the browsing statistics of the user community. No PII is shared from any user's computer or stored in the Wowd Cloud. Data in the Wowd Cloud index data is not visible to users of the system, and Wowd users cannot predict in advance what data will be stored on which computer. The system is completely private. |
| Q: | Can anybody else see my search or browsing history? |
| A: | No. You search and browsing history is kept on your local computer, and is not shared with Wowd or any member of the Wowd community. |
| Q: | How is my personal information stored? |
| A: | Your search and browsing history data is kept in binary-encoded files on your local disk. |
Product Questions |
| Q: | What benefits do I get from installing the full Wowd browser application? |
| A: |
Installing the Wowd browser application gives you to access lots of cool features.
Contribution to the community. Your web browsing statistics can help shape the Wowd Hot List and add public pages to the search index. This is a great way to have your interests represented! You can choose whether or not you want to nominate pages for inclusion in the index via the Wowd Settings page.
More search results. The full version of Wowd allows you to look beyond page one of search results when you need more information.
Personal "Hot Topics" tag cloud. When you perform a search using the full version of Wowd the browser application on your computer will analyze the search results set and display a personalized tag cloud of the "Hot Topics" found within those pages. This can help you refine your existing search or take off in a whole new direction with one click.
My Pages web history. This web history feature helps you to easily find web pages you have visited before. You can also tag items in your history with any tag you like and search for items by these tags so you can quickly find them again.
Social Media Share. With one click, you can share search results or Wowd Hot List items with your Facebook, Twitter or email.
Privacy control. When you perform searches at traditional web search sites you leave a history of what you search for. When you use the full Wowd browser application there are no records of your searches left anywhere, except on your own computer. That's total privacy!
The future. Wowd is constantly providng new features to our customers. When these new features become available they will automatically update Wowd on your computer.
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| Q: | What software does Wowd install? |
| A: | Wowd installs a browser application, consisting of a Wowd "node" process that is responsible for communicating to the other nodes in the Wowd cloud and generating the local user experience and a browser extension for Internet Explorer or Firefox which connects the browser experience to the background node. |
| Q: | Will using Wowd slow down my computer? |
| A: | Wowd is designed to avoid interfering with your normal use of your computer. Wowd will only contribute "idle cycles" to the Wowd Cloud during periods of user inactivity. The only time Wowd "runs hard" is when it is calculating a search results for you. |
| Q: | How are my computer's resources used by Wowd? |
| A: | Wowd uses a tiny fraction of your computer's memory, disk, processing power and network bandwidth to help power the Wowd distributed search engine. This fraction is designed to be so small, you won't notice it. With all Wowd users contributing a tiny amount of compute power, in aggregate, it makes for a truly planetary-scale search engine that gets more powerful as new users join. |
| Q: | How much of my computer's memory and disk capacity does Wowd use? |
| A: | Wowd provides a Settings panel that allows our users full control over how much resource the Wowd application is allowed to use. |
Technology Questions |
| Q: | What is the Wowd architecture? |
| A: | The Wowd search engine is a fully-distributed computation and storage system built out of small contributions from each computer in the Wowd Cloud. Search index data is stored and retrieved from the nodes in the cloud as our users browse the web and perform searches. Wowd uses proprietary techniques to ensure that this distributed system can provide high scalability and great performance. The Wowd Cloud is self-provisioning; it gets faster and more powerful as new users join. |
| Q: | How can Wowd provide rapid response times? |
| A: | For years people have challenged the idea that a fully-distributed system can match the performance of a centralized server cluster. For a focused, centralized computation this may be true. But, the rules of the game change when you consider the requirements of a planetary-scale search engine such as Wowd. Our users are and will be distributed around the world, so many of them will be far away from any specific data center. The usual response is to replicate the data center (and the data) to many locations around the world. Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) take this to the extreme, locating copies of relatively static data in servers all over the world so that one of them will be near any given user. Wowd takes this idea to the next level, creating a fully-writable distributed hash table that supports a "Search Delivery Network" in which the data required to support any given search can be found in a cloud node not far away. Pretty cool, huh? |
| Q: | How will Wowd scale to millions of users and billions of pages? |
| A: | Wowd's distributed approach provides another great advantage: it is self-provisioning. Each new user that joins the Wowd Cloud contributes a small fraction of the computational resources of his or her computer. Thus, the distributed search engine gets more powerful as more users joining the Cloud. Similarly, the more nodes there are in the Cloud, the greater the chance that some node "near" you (in terms of network latency) will have the piece of data that your browser application is looking for as it executes your searches. Finally, the Wowd Cloud is self-balancing. The more interest there is in a particular topic, the more nodes in the Cloud that have data on that topic, or at least routing information to other nodes that have that data. So, Wowd get even faster and stronger as it grows, unlike traditional search engines. |
