While search engines like Yahoo, Excite, and AltaVista pride themselves on casting the widest net possible, Fish4It, eschews the net for a single lure to catch "just one keeper," says Kyle Shannon, head creative executive at online marketing firm Agency.com, which designed Fish4It.
"Right now search engines are extremely useless because you get 30,000 returns but you only really look at 40 of them," Shannon says. "With Fish4It, we give you Number 399 rather than Number 1."
Fish4It, a slightly raunchy and ribald search engine, operates on the serendipity principle, letting users choose a basic term which fires the search-engine synapse. At the site, which launched Wednesday, users enter a search string and the engine hunts down a loosely associated URL. Unlike a more random site roulette, Fish4It returns sites that actually have some relation - albeit tangential - to the initial term (a search for "God" yields a page on "Precautions" by St. John the Divine).
For more specific fancies, users can also dig down through five categories: Poletiks, Secks, Skools, Moovies, or Fastfud. Though the database of hand-picked sites is "svelte," Shannon says the catalog will be expanded quickly. "When you're creating something as revolutionary as Fish4It," he says, "you don't want to skimp on resources."
The engine was built specifically for Agency.com's in-house zine, Urban Desires, to run in the Tech Toys section of an upcoming Gone Fishin' issue. But rather than let it go stale, Shannon promises that Agency.com will upgrade the engine to Fish4ItPRO, with which users will be able to "switch oceans" (dig through other categories like "tech") and put quality sites into "the cooler" for other users to find (like "putting them on heavy rotation" says Shannon).
Serendipity has long played a part of the great Net surf, and random search engines like AltaVista's Surprise, Cool Site of the Moment, and MagicUrl Mystery Trip capitalized early on whimsical hyperlinking. AltaVista spokeswoman Kathy Greenler attributes it to the "Star Trek Effect" - to go where no one has gone before. Although search engines specialize in taking users from point A to point B, Greenler says, "life is all about the journey.... People want to get lost."
For some, the serendipity of Fish4It may seem disarmingly directed. Richard Metzger, who runs the alternative culture search engine DisInformation, did a search on "Satan" and got the homepage of someone he used to work with in Los Angeles. "Fish4it.com may not be much of a search engine," says Metzger, "but it makes for a great high-tech Ouija Board."
