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U Rank: Editing, organizing and sharing searches with your social network

Try our U Rank prototype or check out a recent screencast [IE8 users may have to right-click, download the file and open in Windows Media Player]. Check out our blog for updates.

What is U Rank?

U Rank is a search engine that allows people to organize, edit and annotate search results, as well as share information with others.

We believe that finding something on the web is only the first step for many tasks. To better support people as they are exploring a topic, comparing information, keeping track of what they're learning, and collaborating with others, U Rank has general support for organizing, annotating, remembering, and sharing search results.

U Rank is a research prototype, to help us learn more about how people use such technologies so we can continue to innovate.

How is it useful?
	Here are some of the things we’ve found it useful for: Organize and annotate results: write notes to summarize important information under each URL Lists: keep lists while you're researching ("hotels for my next trip", "DSLRs for me") Collaboration: Share URLs with friends ("related projects", "our reading list") Recommendations: Tell your friends what you like ("best books," "favorite restaurants") Multimedia results: Mix video and images with web results for added context Ego-boosting: Make sure your home page is #1 (at least for you and your friends) Easy to explore what your friends are sharing Short-cuts: Move your favorite sites up; then put an ! in front of the query and go straight to the top result
	... We use U Rank for organizing and annotating sites
	... and for keeping lists of stuff
	... Collaboration: Sharing web sites, work related to a project, useful tools, etc., with others.
	... Recommendations	[Yes, it looks like we should file a bug on our handling of accented characters]
	Nifty multimedia result sets: You can mix video and images with regular web results.
	And, of course, how could we forget ego-boosting?

	Plus, its fun to see what friends are sharing

Project Members

Emre Kıcıman
Shuo Chen
Konstantin Mertsalov (intern, summer 2008)
And many thanks to help, advice and feedback from Susan Dumais, Jer Gallagher, Greg Linden, Merrie Morris, Robert Rounthwaite, Jaime Teevan, Kuansan Wang, Yi-Min Wang, and many others.