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A Web App To Find Web Apps. No, Really.
Web 2.0 has finally gained so much mass that it when it dies, the workers will have to cut a hole in the side of its house and extract its rotting corpse with a crane.
Simple Spark is a search engine that helps you find Web 2.0 applications to suit your lifestyle. Do you live in your mom’s basement, coding a YouTube clone between shifts at the Waffle House? There’s a web app for you. Are you an independent hipster who is going to spend $600 on an iPhone despite buying ratty old t-shirts at a consignment store to delude yourself into feeling bourgeois? There are probably a shit-ton of web apps for you. Simple Spark will help you find them, and then you can drown yourself in a toilet.
It Sucks At Searching, Too
I reviewed FatSecret, a social network for fatasses, some time ago. One could reasonably expect this web app to show up on Simple Spark. Let’s see here, I’m going to search for “weight loss”. Surely that should yield results that are related to losing weight and dieting. The results are:
- Zopa - online lending and borrowing exchange
- Prosper - online community for lending
- Circle Lending - what the fuck? Did I really search for “weight loss”
- Lending Club - yeah, I entered the right query…fuck this. Useless.
All of the web apps returned for a search for “weight loss” have to do with some kind of lending. How…what….why….ah fuck it. I was wrong to expect more. I should know better by now.
Hardcoding Spelling Corrections, Anyone?
The short-bus patrol at TechCrunch reviewed this one. That’s how I found it. They wrote:
The Simple Spark search facility is also language friendly, a search for delicious or Flicker delivers the correct results of del.icio.us and Flickr; we’ve all misspelled Web 2.0 application names before.
Oh good, spell correction for Web 2.0 names. Now that’s actually useful. I tell my mom that I posted some photos oh Flickr, and she, being a person who hasn’t been exposed to the Web 2.0 peanut gallery, would spell it F-L-I-C-K-E-R.
If you type “flicker” into Simple Spark, it will find Flickr. How do they do it? Levenshtein string metric space maybe? Stemming? Anything that requires cognitive thought? I’m guessing no, because a search for “flickar” gives no results. Same for “mebo”. It seems like there’s no intelligent text processing going on here, just a hardcoded list of synonyms. I would doubt that they’re even doing query expansion. FAIL.
Set The Bar Low
Do I just expect too much out of Web 2.0? Should I lower my standards? If I worked at one of these shitheaps, I’d be embarrassed to put my name on any of this.
You stay classy, San Diego.