Doug Cornelius over at KM Space is a prolific blogger.  More importantly, he writes about some really good stuff.  He commented on Now THIS is Social Search about how Vivisimo is doing the Aftervote thing with enterprise search.  Check out Doug’s excellent post on Using Social Search to Drive Innovation through Collaboration for a great explanation.  Here is an excerpt: 

First thing [about Vivisimo's Velocity 6.0 tool] is the ability to vote on whether the item in the search result is useful. It displays the percentage of people that voted up and down. This in turn is fed back into the relevancy algorithm of the search engine. The next step is adding a rating. You can give up to five stars. It also displays the average rating and the number of votes. Administrators can get reports on the rating and use this highlight useful items and bury bad ones. 

Thanks Doug! 

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management for Lawyers and Law Firms
 

Google announced Google Co-Op back in May of 2006, but there hasn’t been much buzz about it. There is another Search tool — an aggregator — called Aftervote.com, that really is a social search site. And this sort of technology may have a place in law firms.

Here’s the deal: You search for something and you get results. Then you can sort the results by rank according to the Aftervote ranking system (more on that below), or the ranking systems behind Google, Yahoo, MSN, Digg, Alexa, or Google Page Rank. (See the red arrow in the picture below). The results display those relative rankings (see the green arrow on the right) and any comments by users.

But best of all is that you can “vote up” results with the Aftervote ranking tool that appears to the left of the result (see the pinkish arrow). In a way, this is sort of like Digg for search results (See Can you Digg it…?) So, the Aftervote community can influence the ranking of results.

But wait, there’s more (see below the picture) …

Because it’s a search aggregator, you can customize the weights of each search engines’ results. Go to the My Settings page and you’ll see sliders for each of the search engines. Increase Google’s weight if you like it more than, say Yahoo. And you can adjust the number of results returned by Yahoo and MSN (but not Google for some reason) by adjusting a different set of sliders from 10 – 100.

There is also a URL blacklist and whitelist feature to remove from (blacklist) or promote (whitelist) certain URLs from your searches.

Pretty cool stuff. But don’t take our word for it, apparently PC Magazine declared Aftervote to be among the “Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites of 2007.”

Now, for all you lawyers out there, this has potential. What if your document management system or KM system search results had a little “vote up” [or down] button next to them. What about that nifty little comment option. You could start socializing the search results of your firm documents. Take it a step further and the “vote up” [or down] button could count toward “on-the-fly” relevancy ranking for your precedent documents.

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management for Lawyers and Law Firms