Wowd, which launched its public beta today, was founded in 2007 to build a new kind of real-time search engine designed to focus on discovery; with an emphasis on "surfacing trends, breaking news, social media topics, and popular pages from around the web." Wowd is intended to tap into the "attention frontier" of its user community and functions similar to a vote-free Digg that includes content from the entire web, such as Twitter, social media, blogs and more.
"The volume and velocity of new information on the web is overwhelming," Wowd CEO Mark Drummond said. "People simply do not have enough time to keep up with the river of real-time data."
"Wowd solves this problem," Drummond added, "by offering an alternative to reference search engines of the last decade."
According to the company, Wowd's unique approach is to determine what's popular based on the pages real people visit. Its Hot List of popular pages updates live before your eyes, making it easy to discover the latest trends, topics, and hottest web pages, with results ranked by popularity or freshness. To get "the full Wowd experience," however, users will need to download the free browser application that works on the Mac, PC and Linux operating systems.
"Wowd puts the user back in control by transferring the power to individuals, not data centers," Wowd's Founder, Boris Agapiev, said. "Wowd doesn't rely on web crawlers or conventional page ranking — we tap into distributed cloud architecture."
"Think of Wowd as the Skype of real-time search," Agapiev concluded.