Volunia was a web search engine (or Social search)
History
The name
Volunia stems from the words "volo" (flight) and "luna" (moon), because – as Marchiori said – he wanted to evoke the
quantum leap his social search engine was trying to deliver.
The Volunia project was entirely developed in Italy: the head office was located in
Padua, the servers were located in
Sardinia and hosted by
Tiscali,
and the whole team, formed by 14 people, was Italian.
The project
Volunia differed from normal search engines in that, while it
web crawler the web and
web indexing websites, it built the
ranking using the comments and opinions of other users.
The Volunia service allowed people to interact with each other in every page they visit,
as well as with the web sites' owners. Volunia used a system similar to
Google Sidewiki. Volunia also introduced for the first time a "fly-over"
map visualization for every web site, where every web site was turned into a city metaphor, also representing social information.
According to Marchiori, Volunia was not meant to be a competitor to the existing search engines, staying on an alternative level.
Despite what Marchiori had said, some people in the internet community considered Volunia a challenge and a potential competitor for Google.
