A birdie told me today that Worio is sending out beta invitations to students in selected universities (I am not going to even pretend which schools these guys are talking about at this point). On the paper, Worio is an interesting concept. Worio is a semantic search engine that uses machine learning techniques to rank pages based on tags among other factors. But the tags are given by other users. In essence, if somebody believes your site to be a shopping site, and they give it the tag “shopping,” you are more likely to get ranked for not only the tag but similar keywords. So the more relevant tags that you receive, the better off you are.

There are some confusions and challenges surrounding this project as well. Worio developers have not included much more information on how their search engine will better the user experience, but they do mention that you will have the ability to remove tags that you don’t agree with. Now that could be tricky as if you are allowed to remove other people’s tags, then you can potentially game the system. What if you have a site that sells a terrible product? People who have used your product might tag you page with “fraud” or other terms. If you get to remove all those tags, you will essentially get to hide your bad reputation. Having said that, the ability to remove tags helps against attacks from let’s say aggressive competitors. But the bigger question is, how important are these tags in the ranking factor. In essence, are these tags as important as SEO title tags or are they like META Keyword? Maybe something in between? Who knows.

I personally don’t find Google to be a perfect search engine, and I am all for these startups coming out with ideas to better our search experience. But nobody has gotten it so far, and I don’t know if anybody will in the foreseeable future. But Worio is definitely an interesting concept and maybe Eric or Mike will be kind enough to share more info on their exciting project.