Sproose was a consumer

search engine A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...

launched in August 2007 by founder Bob Pack. Sproose provided web search results from partners including

MSN MSN (meaning Microsoft Network) is a web portal and related collection of Internet services and apps for Windows and mobile devices, provided by Microsoft and launched on August 24, 1995, alongside the release of Windows 95. The Microsoft N ...

Yahoo! Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo! Inc. (2017–present), Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds ma ...

and Ask.com. Sproose intended to have better-quality results than algorithmic search engines because its users were able to influence the ranking order of the search results by voting for websites (which moved them up in the order of search results) and deleting bad or spam results. It had been compared to

Digg Digg, stylized in lowercase as digg, is an American news aggregator with a curated front page, aiming to select stories specifically for the Internet audience such as science, trending political issues, and viral Internet issues. It was launch ...

and Mahalo.com, among other

social search Social search is a behavior of retrieving and searching on a social searching engine that mainly searches user-generated content such as news, videos and images related search queries on social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and ...

websites. The domain sproose.com is now owned by a British artist.

Use of the site

Registration was not required to search on Sproose. If a user voted for a website, the vote was saved temporarily. In order to save the voted sites permanently, a user had to sign up for an account. When a user registered with Sproose, a personal profile page was created. Each time a site was voted on, a thumbnail and URL of the site would be posted on the user's profile page, which may be public or private. Users could comment on each website; comments were visible to other users. In January 2009, Sproose launched a recommendation engine and voting platform. The recommendation engine allowed users to rate and vote for content on partnered websites, and it allowed for more information to be delivered to a user from the partnered site. It also allowed sharing of information through its "widgets" on social networks such as Facebook.

Company background

Sproose was privately held. The management team was:Corporate Facts
on Sproose.com * Bob Pack – Founder and CEO * Gus Bourg – Vice President of Search Technology * Steve Bourg – Vice President of Network Technology * Stefan Groschupf – CTO

References

{{Reflist Internet search engines