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In a crowded field of search engines, it is quite a challenge to come up with a search service concept that is new and relevant to potential users. Undaunted, the Informatics students in William Jones’ ‘Introduction to Search’ course accepted the challenge as part of their culminating class project.

“Students have built these search services in areas overlooked by the “big guys,” said Jones, “and I’m impressed with the quality, creativity and sheer hard work going into them.” 

The class divided into six teams and used open source software to create a proprietary search service for a niche market that would be presented to a panel of judges at the end of the term. By inviting industry executives and faculty experts to view the presentations and award prizes, students receive immediate feedback on their work and gain valuable resume-building experience. Students were also assigned individual projects, including updating and expanding search topics in public wikis including Wikipedia. 

“This project encompassed all aspects of product development as if we were doing it in the real world as a startup,” said Wendy Kung, a member of Team Perfect Fit, which took first place in the competition. “We were able to start with an idea and follow it through to the end product, while considering the marketing plan, technical plan, and analytics. Being able to create a working prototype for both mobile and web and pitching it to an audience was very rewarding.”

“All the lessons and guest speakers in the class spoke to our work on the project and how to present it. The guest speakers really gave us insight into how to pitch and present something to a group of people, and the lessons all had to do with search engine optimization and other related techniques,” added Perfect Fit teammate Meghan Stavig.

Members of the panel of judges considered the front end user experience of the search engine in addition to the back end technology utilization, plus the presentation skills of the students. Winners were announced after deliberation by the nine judges and include: 

First place: Perfect Fit—a specialized search service for fitness novices. We are inspired by the people who get looked over when you think about fitness - people who are interested and intrigued by the idea of being physically fit, but simply don’t know how to go about doing so.
Second place: Dansmonfrigo—a search service designed specifically to help the average citizen find recipes that utilize ingredients they have in their refrigerator.
Third place: Drive—a search service to provide users with the most relevant car information based on what they need, from servicing and repairing your own car to advice on how to drive under certain conditions like snow and rain.

The panel of invited judges included:
Bob Boiko, iSchool senior lecturer and author of “Content Management Bible” and “Laughing at the CIO”
Ken Colborn, SEO specialist at Portent
Darryn Dieken, corporate vice president, Shared Platform, Microsoft
Jim Gemmell, CTO of Trōv and co-author of the book “Your Life, Uploaded: The Digital Way to Better Memory, Health and Productivity"
Mariah Gentry, co-founder of JoeyBra, Inc.  and Wild Wing Studios
Mike Eisenberg, dean emeritus and founder of the Information School.
Mike Kelly, managing partner Tech DNA
Amit Levy, Computer Science Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University and co-founder of MemCachier - memcache-as-a-service for web applications hosted on platforms like Heroku, cloudControl & EC2.
Brennen Smith, IT risk advisor for Ernst & Young and co-founder and lead system architect for Wild Wing Studios