''Volunia'' was a

web 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 ...

(or social search engine) created by Massimo Marchiori. It was launched in beta only for registered ''power users'' on February 6, 2012 and went live on June 14, 2012. Volunia, dubbed as "the search engine of the future", was speculated to be based on Hyper Search technology. On June 8, 2012, Marchiori announced with an open letter that he had been excluded from his project: six days later, on June 14, 2012, the site went live, but it ceased to operate in February 2014.

History

The name ''Volunia'' stems from the words “volo” (flight) and “luna” (moon), because – as Marchiori says – he wanted to evoke the ''quantum leap'' his social search engine was trying to deliver. The Volunia project has been entirely developed in Italy: the head office is located in

Padua Padua ( ; it, Padova ; vec, Pàdova) is a city and ''comune'' in Veneto, northern Italy. Padua is on the river Bacchiglione, west of Venice. It is the capital of the province of Padua. It is also the economic and communications hub of the ...

, the servers are located in

Sardinia Sardinia ( ; it, Sardegna, label=Italian, Corsican and Tabarchino ; sc, Sardigna , sdc, Sardhigna; french: Sardaigne; sdn, Saldigna; ca, Sardenya, label=Algherese and Catalan) is the second-largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, after ...

and hosted by

Tiscali Tiscali S.p.a. () is an Italian telecommunications company, based in Cagliari, Sardinia, that provides internet and telecommunications services to its domestic market. It previously had operations in other European nations through its acquisitio ...

, and the whole team, formed by 14 people, is Italian.

The project

Volunia differs from normal search engines in that, while it crawls the web and

indexes Index (or its plural form indices) may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Fictional entities * Index (''A Certain Magical Index''), a character in the light novel series ''A Certain Magical Index'' * The Index, an item on a Halo megastru ...

websites, it builds the

ranking A ranking is a relationship between a set of items such that, for any two items, the first is either "ranked higher than", "ranked lower than" or "ranked equal to" the second. In mathematics, this is known as a weak order or total preorder of ...

using the comments and opinions of other users. The Volunia service allows people to interact with each other in every page they visit, as well as with the web sites' owners. Volunia uses a system similar to Sidewiki. Volunia also introduces for the first time a "fly-over"

map A map is a symbolic depiction emphasizing relationships between elements of some space, such as objects, regions, or themes. Many maps are static, fixed to paper or some other durable medium, while others are dynamic or interactive. Although ...

visualization for every web site, where every web site is turned into a city metaphor, also representing social information. According to Marchiori, Volunia is not a competitor to the existing search engines, staying on an alternative level. Despite what Marchiori said, some people in the internet community consider Volunia a challenge and a potential competitor for Google.

References

{{Web search engines Defunct internet search engines