-      HeyStaks looks to a new era of online search relevance through social collaboration

HeyStaks Technologies, the social web-search start-up company with offices in NovaUCD and San Francisco, has launched its initial products in the US market. The launch took place earlier this week at the annual DEMO Spring 2011 conference held in Palm Desert, California.

The worldwide DEMO conferences focus on emerging technologies and new product innovations which are selected from across the spectrum of the technology marketplace. Throughout its 20 years of existence, DEMO has earned a reputation for consistently identifying new innovations that are most likely to disrupt the markets they serve and/or change the way technology is used.

Search engines have not evolved much since Google hit the scene. Algorithmic solutions are still driving core relevancy, content farms are becoming increasingly prevalent and a serious nuisance to consumers, and no meaningful social search solutions have been introduced.  While some have dabbled in searching of social content, no one has until now provided consumers with what is really needed, effective social searching of content to drive higher relevance of core web search results.

HeyStaks iPhone App

HeyStaks is a new social web search service that allows you to collaborate anonymously with friends and people of like minded interest as you search, to get better, more relevant results recommended by people you trust around topics that matter to you. HeyStaks works with your favourite search engine so you continue searching as normal.

Speaking in California, Jonathan Dillon, CEO, HeyStaks said, “Just as Google reshaped the world of search by paying attention to the links between pages, we believe that our social connections have the potential to usher in the new era of search,” He added, “HeyStaks helps both consumer and enterprise searchers to get the right information at the right time, across all search engines, and helps us all become more productive searchers.”

HeyStaks Screen Shot

With HeyStaks users can create ‘search staks’, collections of the best web pages from a group of users on a particular topic. These ‘staks’ can be made public and easily shared with colleagues and friends via email, Twitter, etc., or kept private or shared on an invite-only basis.  The product provides an effective solution for users who share a common goal or shared interest, allowing them to search the web in a collaborative fashion using mainstream search engines, to make their searches much more effective by keeping the content relevance of results high. 

As an example, a ‘stak’ might cover travel information for Northern California, or start-up advice, or a group’s favourite restaurants. As a user, you choose your preferred ‘staks’ and who to collaborate anonymously with to get better search results. You might have one friend who has great insight into the design scene but knows nothing about high-tech start-ups.

HeyStaks, a University College Dublin spin-out company, was founded in 2008 by Dr Peter Briggs, Dr Maurice Coyle and Professor Barry Smyth. HeyStaks is based on technology developed as part of Professor Smyth’s research group and the CLARITY Centre for Sensor Web Technologies, a Science Foundation Ireland funded research centre between UCD, Dublin City University, and the Tyndall National Institute.

According to Professor Barry Smyth, HeyStaks, co-founder, “Our research combines some interesting stats that have driven our products.  One in 4 of our searches are for things we have previously found, 2 in 3 of our searches are for things someone in our social network has found, and yet mainstream search engines do not take advantage of this inherently social aspect of web search.  And there is still a 50% query failure rate across the search engines.” He added, “So our research group set about developing a new approach to web search that is informed by the searches of people we know and trust.”

Jonathan Dillon, a former Vice-President of Corporate Development of Yahoo!, who was responsible for many of Yahoo!’s acquisitions and integrations during 2003-2008 said that, “Interestingly, around this general time Yahoo! acquired Delicious and had a similar yet more modest vision for social search.  It didn’t work for various reasons, including the immaturity of social graphs, and social relevance ranking not being well understood.  We in the search industry know that users have been wanting a more social experience for a while but no one has delivered. Now is exactly the right time for a solution like HeyStaks, which is meta and works across the search engines and social networks.”

He concluded, “We will also roll out an innovative advertising model later this year that capitalises on the higher relevance community filtered model and drives an ad model that is more appealing to consumers and results in higher ROI for advertisers.”

During 2010 HeyStaks secured €1 million in venture funding from The Ulster Bank Diageo Venture Fund, which is managed by NCB Ventures.  In addition to its Irish headquarters in NovaUCD, the Innovation and Technology Transfer Centre, HeyStaks also has an office in San Francisco where Jonathan Dillon is based.

Click here to download the desktop and mobile products, including the HeyStaks app for a better search experience.

ENDS

3 March 2011

For further information contact Micéal Whelan, NovaUCD, e: miceal.whelan@ucd.ie, t: +353 (0)1 716 3712 or Professor Barry Smyth, HeyStaks, e: barry.smyth@heystaks.com.

Editors Notes

HeyStaks is a unique technology that allows searchers to harness their social graphs as they search on their favourite search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing etc), effectively bringing together the content sharing world of the social networks and the query-based search world of mainstream search engines. HeyStaks delivers community-enhanced search results that are more personalised and relevant than conventional search engine results, and is fully integrated with the leading search engines. HeyStaks was founded by Professor Barry Smyth, Dr Maurice Coyle and Dr Peter Briggs. The company has offices in NovaUCD and in San Francisco.  

Produced by the IDG Enterprise events group, the worldwide DEMO conferences focus on emerging technologies and new products innovations, which are hand selected from across the spectrum of the technology marketplace. The DEMO conferences have earned their reputation for consistently identifying cutting-edge technologies and helping entrepreneurs secure venture funding and establish critical business. www.demo.com

NovaUCD, the Innovation and Technology Transfer Centre, is the hub of knowledge transfer activities at University College Dublin. NovaUCD is responsible for the commercialisation of intellectual property arising from UCD research and for the development of co-operation with industry and business. NovaUCD as a purpose-built centre also nurtures new technology and knowledge-intensive enterprises such as HeyStaks Technologies. NovaUCD has been funded through a unique public-private partnership that includes AIB Bank, Arthur Cox, Deloitte, Enterprise Ireland, Ericsson, Goodbody Stockbrokers, UCD and Xilinx.