A few days back, I received an email from a friend introducing a service called Digle search. I usually ignore such emails but due to the fact that this email was from a reliable friend, I just clicked it to find out more. On the first sight, it just looked like a search engine – another guy who wants to compete with google. I just entered a query about hairpieces, that is the first thing that came to my mind at that moment, and pressed the enter button. To my surprise, the search engine asked me to sign in before I can make a search. Why on the earth I need to create an account and sign in to make a simple search query. I thought of closing the browser window, but I did not. First, it was referred by one of my reliable friends, and second I was a bit curious. So, I decided to create an account and give it a try – just one try.
The signup process was very easy. And thanks God, I was able to submit a query without verifying my email address. There was a reminder stuck to the top of the page, however, but I can bear that. To my astonishment, once again, there was no search result. Instead, my query was created and propagated to other users, who are supposed to help me find my required item. Here is what I think of this service.
Search Engine – Not Exactly
I know many people would compare this service to a search engine, but I do not. In my opinion, this service is entirely different from a search engine. Search Engines are based on algorithms designed in a different way.
What is the Digle advantage?
Of course, search engines are very useful. In fact, they are now an integral part of our lives. However, they are not designed to find things the way Digle is. Let’s have a little example. Suppose someone asked to find a hand-made item for drawing room. When I saw the query, something popped up in my mind. One of my friends is shifting his home to another state and told me that he is selling some old items that are difficult to move. And one of these items exactly matches the query someone posted on Digle. I also remember that I saw such an item in an antique shop. So, I can add both items as a response to the searcher.
Now, in both of the above-mentioned scenarios, one cannot find these items through a search engine like google. Search engines only show the things that are already posted on the internet. Furthermore, to show the posted information in search engines, one must first rank for that particular query. This is called search engine optimization and it requires a lot of resources. So, even if I post an item on the internet, there is no guarantee that it will be visible to the potential searchers. SEO model favors big players who have spent resources to rank for their queries of interest.
The Shortcomings
When you sign up for Digle, you are given three credits, and you can use free credits to post searches. However, if you want your searchers to take some real interest in finding your required item, you need to buy Digle credits. These credits will serve as a financial reward for winning searcher.
In fact, the price of credit is far less than the savings you can have by finding the right item. And personally, I would like to award Digle credits as a thank you token for the searchers who helped me find my desired things.
However, there is one pitfall that needs to be addressed. This model works well when there is a large number of users. A large number of users will naturally be able to find the most suitable items for any query. As this service is new, I don’t expect that they have a large user base. However, as their service will mature and the number of users will increase, it has the potential to change the way people search for things. With their Android app already launched and iOS app on the way, we can expect a good number of users to post queries as well as find the suitable items.
