New Search Engine Metro5 Launches Open BETA - Takes Social Influence Into Account When Ranking Websites

Metro5 Launches Beta Program - Delivers a set of up to 50 relevant results for each web search query, while taking social influence into account when ranking these results.

Den Haag (I-Newswire) October 18, 2012 - Today, search engine Metro5 http://metro5.com/ has announced the launch of it's open BETA program. The idea behind Metro5 is to deliver a set of up to 50 relevant results for each web search query, while taking social influence into account when ranking these results.

There are many search engines available on the web, who claim to be the most relevant, fastest and user friendly. However, none of them rank websites by user popularity. Here is where Metro5 is different. Metro5 enables users to vote for or against websites using their Twitter account, meaning users can actually influence results.

Allowing people to vote for something based on their IP address or cookies is not reliable. IP addresses are not something you can "count on", as they can change, while cookies can be deleted. People often share an IP address at their homes, their library or their office and would not be able to vote for (or against) a website, because someone else with the same IP address or proxy server has already voted. Here is where Twitter comes into play.

If people vote for or against a website, they cast their vote under their own username, meaning others can see who voted for or against a website. Such a voting concept helps us fight abuse and also takes the influence of single users into account when Metro5 collect the votes once a month.

"We have created this search engine to showcase the power of social media. Unlike most search engines, we do not count links to rank websites. We give the power of ranking websites to the user, meaning the results will reflect just that. The more people vote for a website, the higher it will rank. It's that easy.", Jan De Mol, Metro5's head developer said.

Because there will always be people who will try to "cheat the system" by either asking friends or paying people to vote for their website or against their competition, Metro5 employs a strict set of rules when collecting votes from Twitter. Metro5 first filters out bots, then cross-checks accounts to see if there are too many similarities between accounts who voted for or against a web site. Once that is done, Metro5 takes the social influence and the Twitter account age of every single voter into account when processing the votes.

Metro5 crawls the web and news sites to build a searchable index. Metro5 follows the robots.txt standard and does not access websites more than once every 5 seconds to prevent any extra load.

The open BETA program enables users and site owners to have a look how Metro5 works and also accepts website submissions. A flat-fee advertising program is planned in future, which will enable site owners to pay a flat fee for unlimited exposure and clicks during 30 days.

For more information:

Metro5 Search
c/o Nicole De Mol
Email: press@metro5.com

On the web:
http://metro5.com/

Contact Metro5:
http://metro5.com/helpdesk

On Twitter:
https://twitter.com/metro5search