Disclaimer: I’m being paid to write this review.

Sproose happily describes itself as:

the search engine of the people, by the people, for the people and NOT corporations. Only a quality site reviewed by real people can move up.

At a time when too many new sites and services — whether it makes sense or not — are promoting some kind of social network complete with voting, mini- and micro-blogging, commenting, tagging and/or some variation of features thereof, what Sproose promotes in their tagline above didn’t seem very original to me. It also seemed awkward and forced coming from a search engine. I’ll get back to other issues with this motto before this post is done.

As someone who once had faith in the human edited Dmoz project — but no worries, not any more — I was mildly intrigued how good Sproose human promoted results would compare against Google (disclaimer #2: I own GOOG stock). After seeing dozens of also ran search engines, my expectations for Sproose weren’t too high, which probably helps their grade for those who want to skip the blow-by-blow specifics to the last section summary.

Not registering doesn’t make much sense
Registering at Sproose allows you to vote up or down search results for other users — guest voting doesn’t impact the search results of others, which sort of misses the point of the site — so I jumped in. I left the checkbox default checked “share vote history” and Sproose kicked me back with an error message over my email.

Hmm readers are probably tiring of me pointing this out with so many registration forms but it’s a great recurring example of how many programmers are using flawed regular expressions. The + symbol is allowed in email addresses. Please fix that, Sproose crew.

After entering another email address that didn’t have the +, I was greeted with a page offering me three options: upload a picture, take a tour and start searching.

Rarely skipping an opportunity to seed the web with pictures of my ugly mug, I went with top green arrow #1. After a familiar web upload option, I was redirected to my profile page.

Although I personally don’t mind receiving adult search results, I decided to leave the default option of filtering these results and go back in the browser to the green arrow options. I dragged the “Sproose it Up!” bookmarklet to my bookmark bar, although shortening to ’sproose’. Hey, space up there is at a premium (wink, wink, nudge, nudge Sproose crew).

Next I chose the tour which graphically showed how to use Sproose. Graphic instructions are easy to follow and look a little comic-like with the bubble text. If you know how to use digg or any of the digg clones the same premise applies with Sproose: if you like it, vote for it. The more votes from Sproose users makes the site appear higher in the search results.

Don’t like something? Click on the trash can graphic. Unsurprisingly, you can leave comments on pages a la stumbleupon and countless other services. If somebody else comments at Sproose you’ll get an email alerting you of their comments. I hope there is a feature to disable these emails because I never saw one. In each mail they do have an unsubscribe message though. This is counter-productive for those to leave comments. I want to get follow-up comments on blogs posts and forum threads where I leave comments, not on Sproose search results.

One glaring problem with services like this is the flawed perception that everybody voting is following the rules: good = good, bad = trash. What about those who go in and trash can a bunch of good results just because they don’t like the webmaster? Or perhaps worse conversely by voting up content that isn’t high quality? This is a very real concern that very few voting systems I’ve seen in my 10+ years on the web have addressed properly.

One last word on the Sproose tour. Would have been nice to see text instructions for the sight-impaired. The images didn’t have descriptive ALT tags rendering the tour page not very accessibility or search engine friendly. If only webmasters had to view their sites with impaired vision …

Egosearch results
As with many other search engines, I start with searching on keywords that I think our sites should rank high. I started with the keyword ‘hmm’ which if you try that in Google this blog is currently ranked #3. In Sproose it was the top result on the second page. I voted for it and the following showed:

Immediately this got me thinking if Sproose disallowed or discouraged voting for your own sites? It appears to be the reverse with Sproose providing webmasters with several ways to add Sproose it up buttons to your site “Your site moves up in Sproose results - attracting more new users for you!”

In the case of this blog ‘readers’ would be a better, more friendly description, but they should probably just change “users” to “visitors” for variety.

Spreading the search result love around
Now does this mean you should race to register for Sproose voting up your sites for keywords for only or even primarily your own site(s)? No, you wouldn’t want to vote up your own posts at digg or thumbs up only your own stuff at Stumbleupon either.

I decided to use it for a series of recent searches I’d made on Google (using Google Web History feature) and vote up the best results in Sproose for the same queries. Earlier today I was wondering what year music CDs were first released. Among others I tried the following queries: year music cd released to market and history of music cd. Neither revealed a simple, quick answer of the year. I ended back up at Google which led me to this New York Times archive article from August 25, 1991: “Available only since 1983, CD’s have taken the music business by storm and now account for 43.6 percent, or 286 million units, of all the music sold annually.”

‘Sproosing’ that listing didn’t give me an option for a specific keyword combination, so guess I’m leaving it on faith for the next searcher to find that result? The ability to assign results to pages part when viewing a page would be a nice addition, or if it’s a feature making it more obvious. Instead, Sproose puts itself in a cliched top position frame that most likely will be blocked on some percentage of websites (although none blocked during my testing successfully). Also the popup window for comments in Firefox has the text getting cut off in the form, another bug needing fixed.

Tried a couple other search results and pumped up good sites like: ’stumbleupon’, ‘download web browser’ (Firefox, Opera, Safari), ‘blog software’ (Wordpress), ‘online auctions’ (eBay), ‘p2p voip’ (Skype), ‘classifieds’ (Craigslist), ‘dictionary’ (Dictionary.com), ‘podsafe music’ (Podshow), ‘dokken’ (official Don Dokken website), ‘van halen’ (official Van Halen website) and more.

I didn’t check in Internet Explorer but logged in and ran a few searches in Safari on the Mac successfully. Good to see the Mac crowd not left out.

Sproose offers a video search powered by Blinkx which I found a search for Hmmcast, a specific query, revealed only two results. Considering the next episode will be #176 (still working through the maze of HD in order to get back to a regular schedule again), that isn’t too impressive for a service pounding on the pipes for 2+ years (Blinx, not Sproose)

Summary and grade
I’ve been saying for awhile that the next evolution of search engine will incorporate some amount of human and machine and I remain interested in what people put together. Comparing Sproose against human assisted results from competitors like ChaCha.com, I’d rather use ChaCha at the present time. And there are no incentives to search like with Winzy or Blingo unless you are a webmaster and promoting your own pages.

Add to the above that the underlying machine search results I tested were merely … ok. Not something I could see using instead of Google. Also found very few common Sproose search results with votes which suggests that the number of people using Sprooce is still small. That’s to be expected for any new service, but to draw people away from the mighty G, they’re going to need some sort of hook beyond digg-style voting on sites. I know, I know, but they are new and we’re supposed to roll up our shirts and donate our time to the social network cause making their search results better something like what the Wikipedia is doing for encyclopedia.

Now back to that pesky Sproose motto. That Sproose is “for the people and NOT corporations.” My follow-up question is: for how long?

Hate to break it to these companies — unless you are a non-profit (did I miss that about Sproose?) — but some of us out here guard our time jealously. I’m not going to burn sand in the hour glass at your site making it better so at some later day you can sell the service to a bigger fish or IPO and make bank to go off and find some other new startup to begin the process anew. Sproose is going to have a tough job gaining traction if people distrust them seconds after they reach the site. They can help things by replacing that motto with something less like a political speech. Maybe something like: “working together we can build a better search.” Not that, but along those lines maybe.

I digress. For those with websites, you might want to dip a toe or two in the Sproose pool, but non-webmasters won’t find much to get excited about here yet. Grade: C

Update 8:12pm PST: Added a missing screenshot, the one showing how once I voted for the site in the egosurf area it moved up in the results. Also, Bob Parks, the CEO of Sproose stopped by to comment below. He said I missed some important features and I’m waiting for clarification back in the comments what exactly those features were/are.

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