When is the last time you’ve seen a porn site that has user experience as a priority rather than spamming the shit out of you for clicks and conversions? As you might expect, these are rare gems in the adult industry. But I am surprised to find such a noble ideal in a porn search engine called EveKnows.
EveKnows officially launched in July 2007 “with an emphasis on clean, quality results and absolutely no pay-for-placement galleries.” EveKnows distinguishes itself from other porn search engines by offering an advanced search algorithm, search suggestions, misspelling corrections, custom RSS feeds for queries, automated indexing, and open development. The programmer behind this project is a programming genius if this is truly all of his own work.
I can say with confidence that EveKnows is the adult industry equivalent of Google. The results are clean, accurate, and you have to love the misspelling feature. If I were Sex.com, I would seriously consider acquiring EveKnows or at least licensing its technology to replace the crappy AJAX search engine that is currently on its website (the web’s best adult search my ass).
EveKnows indexes thumbnail and movie galleries while ordering the results by an algorithm similar to Google’s. Following in the footsteps of PageRank, EveKnows counts the number of links pointing to a gallery and weighs it accordingly among websites relevant to the query. The user can choose whether to search for picture galleries only or movie galleries only, or both. Then the search results tells you how many pictures or videos are contained in the gallery, a thumbnail from the gallery, and the most recent date the page was crawled.
Just like a classic Web 2.0 startup, EveKnows has transparency. We can follow the development of this advanced porn search engine through a blog where the developer Aidan Trent discusses interesting details like server problems, version upgrades, and programming tricks.
It’s great that EveKnows is taking the “do no evil” approach as an innovative porn search engine. But I’m afraid that this promising website may not last very long with EveKnows’ current business approach. I doubt that EveKnows, just like most other porn sites, has any VC or angel funding even though it is a tech startup. So that would mean that all server and development costs are coming out of Aidan’s own bank account. That puts EveKnows in a suicidal situation where it needs more exposure as a up-and-coming web 2.0 search engine, but more traffic would increase bandwidth costs and bring bankruptcy closer to reality. Is the outlook for tech startups in the adult industry so despicable that companies must be greedy first before being innovative?
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January 9th, 2008 at 7:37 pm
About time too!