Wowd is a real-time search engine for discovering what’s popular on the web right now.

Like other real-time search engines, Wowd delivers information seconds after it appears on the web. Unlike others, Wowd covers the entire web – any publically available page, from any web site, anywhere, can potentially be included in the Wowd index.

Like reference search engines, Wowd performs indexing and ranking of search results… but it does so in a way that takes into account pages preferred by real users. Wowd does not use crawlers that mindlessly follow links, filling an index with material that real people would never look at. Wowd finds and ranks information according to the preferences and interests of real humans.

Members of the Wowd user community, the “Wowd Crowd”, determine web page popularity. Traditional search ranking methods are based on how pages link to each other, and this approach has been thoroughly gamed by web site publishers seeking search engine optimization. People are much better at finding good web pages and avoiding bad ones than computer programs will ever be. So Wowd taps into this human judgment and gives higher ranking to the pages people choose to visit.

Wowd users nominate public pages for inclusion in the index just by visiting them. When a Wowd Crowd member visits a public web page, it is automatically nominated, and the page is immediately added to the index. No explicit voting or manual voting is required.