Renato Soru, president and managing director of Tiscali, the Italian telecommunications company based in Cagliari, presented the new search engine today in Rome “star“. It is a very ambitious project, considering the competitors and the risk of poor visibility. It is not an anti-Google product, rather a search refinement system in favor of Italian culture.
In fact, doing an experiment with any keyword, the results of istella are not so different from those returned by the Google Italy page. If, on the other hand, a term is used that has something to do with Italian culture in a specific way, for example "Colosseum", the Tiscali search engine has, as its first result, a frame that leads directly to the "Colosseum" entry on the Encyclopedia site Treccani, while Google it doesn't surprise us at all with the classic link to Wikipedia.
Furthermore, the Sardinian engine has a strong component of "crowdsourcing” since, among other results, it offers some photos of Flickr which have “Colosseum” and “Italy” as tags. Thanks to the "contribute" section, all users will be able to enrich the contents by uploading documents to be made available for research. The algorithm that allows this revolution in the order of priority and in the selection of sources for the so-called "SERP" (Search Engine Results Page) comes from the know-how of the technicians who had worked on one of the first Italian search engines, Arianna and, clearly, from the agreements made by Soru with archives, bodies and institutions.
Among the most interesting features is that of maps. A mix of the data provided by Nokia and those of some historical archives. In fact, it is possible to observe both the connection paths between two different points of the country, and to focus attention on how the Italian territory has changed.
Tiscali for Italian telecommunications has always been source of innovation and has repeatedly revolutionized the way of using the technology of the Net. From the abolition of Internet subscription costs to the forerunner of Italian software for Voice over IP, Soru's company has always set the pace for the development of products and ideas that others then marketed or carried forward, often and willingly without acknowledging the paternity of the "first furrow" to Tiscali.
Soru's closest goal is to involve the public administration to take advantage of the wave of open data and bring everything available to istella. Leading the way in the free market is too often synonymous with "getting your idea stolen" by those who have more resources or by those who can count on a larger catchment area. Will it be like this for Tiscali this time too?
