John Battelle’s has written a piece on Transparensee at the esteemed Searchblog Many of you are familiar with Transparansee founder Steve Lavine. Steve has been showing off Transparensee search capabilities at the last few dating conferences.
Transparensee’s “Discovery Search Engine” seeks to address the “stupid computer” problems which plague most structured databases. You most likely have experienced some variant of this: you put in a set of parameters meant to find just what you are looking for – for example, on Fodor’s, you want French bistros in Chelsea priced at $35 with a food rating of 20 or above – and you get no results, or only one or two. You have a sneaking suspicion that the results are missing an entire set of possibilities which are “close enough” to what you want, but you’ve been limited by the parameters you chose – if you open it up too much, you get a bunch of stuff you don’t want. What to do?
The ability to loosen search parameters to guarantee decent search results is an interesting idea who’s merit becomes apparent the first time you get too specific in your dating site search queries. Nothing feels worse to online daters than being told that there are no matches for them.
The Example: Online Dating Example page has more information, as well as a PDF overview of the features and benefits of the service.
Transparensee’s flagship product, the Discovery Search Engine™, is definitely worth taking a look at if you are looking for ways to differentiate your service and provide members with improved search capabilities.
