Preparing to relaunch, Jelly wants to bring ‘humanity’ back to search

There has always been a sense that a human could provide a more accurate or more nuanced answer than a index-based search engine. But none of the efforts to build a human-powered alternative have thus far succeeded.

Whether you want to call them “social search,” “help engines,” “Q&A sites,” “answer engines” or “advice engines,” there have been more than a dozen attempts over the past seven or eight years to improve upon the familiar Google experience and bring humans more directly into the mix. To name only a few: Yahoo Answers, Answers.com, Askville (Amazon), ChaCha, Facebook Questions, Keen, Rewarder, Quora and Vark.

Many are gone, though some still exist. Jelly, from Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone, was among them. Announced as a “new way to search,” Jelly launched in 2014 and met largely the same fate as most of the others on the list. However Jelly is coming back.

Photo credit: Andrea Joliet

In a blog post yesterday, Stone teased his session with Danny Sullivan today at SXSW:

Jelly Industries, Inc writes code and builds technology. Five of our eight employees are top notch engineers. We are a tech startup. We’ve recently built a little AI, a unique routing algorithm, some natural language processing, and made use of so many other technologies. But Jelly doesn’t search the web. It finds you the person with the answer you need.

Jelly is the only search engine in the world with an attitude, an opinion, and the experience to back it up. Only Jelly can say you asked the wrong question, provide answers you didn’t think to ask, and deliver a thoughtful answer to your anonymous query. Jelly is humanity presented as software. Search as we know it now is 20 years old.

This sounds quite similar to statements made at the original launch of Jelly but we’ll have to wait and see how the new app differs from the old. In the meantime, here are some of the tweets from Danny’s interview of Biz:

New @jelly will integrate AI, algos and data science to help people find answers. Web search interface makes it intuitive. #NextSearch #SXSW

— Charo Henriquez (@charohenriquez) March 14, 2016

Promoted answers by brands could be a thing / rev model @Jelly says @Biz to @dannysullivan #SXSW #nextsearch

— elisabeth osmeloski (@elisabethos) March 14, 2016

Your question will always get answered on @jelly – @biz calls it “No question left behind.” Love it! #NextSearch #SXSW

— Andrea Joliet (@AndreaJoliet) March 14, 2016

Sounds like @Biz ‘s goal is to rank People w/ answers as Subject Matter Experts via algo @Jelly #NextSearch #SXSW cc: @dannysullivan

— elisabeth osmeloski (@elisabethos) March 14, 2016

.@jelly Also sounds comparable to @StackOverflow @StackExchange conceptually at least #nextsearch

— Mark Lee (@therealmarklee) March 14, 2016

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