Review of Aftervote (formerly younanimously)

Disclosure: This is a paid review. Saying that, all our reviews are honest. It wouldn’t be fair otherwise.

What is it?

It may be easier to start with telling you what aftervote isn’t. It isn’t an average search engine. Aftervote is a social search engine. But what does that mean? From Aftervote themselves:

AfterVote(Younanimous) is a new twist on a old idea. For years now, sites have existed as “meta search engines” which would search Google, Yahoo and MSN. The problem with these search engines is that they were unbearably slow, as they had to query Google, Yahoo, and MSN before they had anything to display.

Enter AfterVote(Younanimous): With an AJAX backbone, YOU Search Google, MSN, and Yahoo and let us know what you found and then we rank them for you, while providing additional detail about each result such as Alexa ranking, Google Pagerank, domain age and much more.

So what does that mean? Well, two things really. The first being that results are based upon websites from the indexes of the top three search engines meaning that a vast number of webpages are ‘crawled.’ The second, and perhaps more interesting feature set, is the interactivity. You have control of searches. To find out more about these, let’s take a look at the feature set…

Features

Search Result Voting

In true Reddit style, search results can be upvoted (or bookmarked) or downvoted (or blacklisted) so future searches are more tailored to you.

Critics may think that this is rather gimmicky but it does makes sense. Continual usage will provide good results for the end user.

Search Result Actions

This is the most social aspect of aftervote. Within the search results page the user can do the following:

• Submit the result directly to Digg or del.icio.us.
• Email the result.
• Translate the page.
• View BugMeNot login details for sites.
• Use the WayBack machine on a result.

Editing one’s settings will allow different social features to be present the results page. The list is impressively extensive. The only drawback for me with these features is the logic. Assuming you don’t know whether you like the result yet, you’d have to click the result then hit the back button before making use of these features.

Search Result Details

Aftervote also provides some site parameters for the user. Pagerank and Alexa rank. Although this may be useful to some, I think these stats are rather misleading and outdated. I personally don’t visit a site depending on its PR or Alexa rating. Maybe time to replace them with more tools for the social search?

Search Bar Option

Firefox users (and others?) will be pleased that aftervote can be added straight to the search bar. It’s a simple feature but an indispensable one for the hardcore aftervoter.

Other Features

There is more to aftervote. I believe that I’ve given you an explanation of the core feature set. Feel free to explore the search engine and feedback with features or settings you found interesting.

Summary

In short, this isn’t a Google-beater. But it’s not trying to be. Aftervote is trying to perfect social search. Some search engine purists will hate it and prefer results to be clean and untouched. Others will find the combinations of search functions and social aspects a real treat to use.

Likes:

• Social filtering of search results
• Aesthetically pleasing
• Plugs straight into Firefox

Dislikes:

• A bit slow when performing searches (but it does pull in a lot of data)
• Logic of social submission buttons.

I wish the small albeit innovative aftervote team the best of luck. Something like this could quickly evolve into a world-beating social search engine. This could go big-time.

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