Build your own search robot at Searchbots

Back in February, Mark Zeman, Lecturer and Subject Director in Digital Media, College of Creative Arts, Massey University, New Zealand, tipped me off to a search agent research project called Searchbots. I tagged it as something to blog about in my email and then, well, I got busy with my new job.
I’ve finally checked it out. Mark was clever enough to give me short precis of the project:
* Experimental social search engine created as a Masters in Design project.
* Build your own search robot and send it out to search on your behalf.
* Search using tags, location, color and mood, or ask a question.
* Get ongoing personalized reports and feeds.
* Talk to it and feed your Searchbot metadata to keep it alive.
* The more you interact with your Searchbot the better everyone’s results.
* Runs on top of API’s from Google, Yahoo, Digg & del.icio.us and more.
* Cross references popular Digg items with del.icio.us tags.
* Building an artificial intelligence using people’s common sense and clicks.
* 34,000+ Searchbots built.
* Interactive tag clouds & other metadata games to play with your Searchbot.
* Get your unique tag cloud plus your Searchbot printed on a tee-shirt.
* Your Searchbots finds facts and entertainment. Mix it up.
* Diligently retrieving the best of the Internet for the good of humanity.
Here are the questions (to users) the research is designed to address:
* Does personifying the search interface increase the motivation of
users to contribute metadata?
* Will users become attached to their Searchbots through ongoing
interaction and therefore be willing to play metadata games to keep it
alive?
* Will using mythology and game theory help make searching an active
give-and-take relationship? Will this sustain an open-content social
search engine?
* Would you rather fill out a basic form or talk to a Searchbot? An
agent that works on your behalf to wade through search results.
* How will users respond to creatively tagging the web? If I search for
the color red will I find a website about tomatoes, communism or angry
people?
* How would you define your ongoing “relationship” with your search
engine? Does it endlessly talk in your ear or just drip-feed you good
clues?
Mark said he was planning to run a survey of users so if he notices this post, he can chime in and let us know “some of the findings on how personifying the interface effects users motivation levels.”