SnappyFingers is a Question/Answer search engine that has been on the web since last July. It is currently still in beta. I had a chat with Chirayu Patel, the founder of SnappyFingers to find out a little more about it.
Patel tells me SnappyFingers launched with around 3 million Q&As, and has since increased to 13 million. “We crawl the Internet and also allow people to submit links to their FAQs,” explains Patel. “In the last couple of months, owing to increase in awareness, we have seen a bump in the URLs submitted.”
As of right now, Snappyfingers only indexes FAQ pages, but (keep in mind its in beta) they’re currently experimenting with Q&A extraction from forums, blogs, and other media.
Sometimes the best answers are not going to come from FAQs. For example, if I want to find the answer to the question “What formats are there for AdSense?” Obviously Google’s going to point me to the AdSense format page. With SnappyFingers, I’m not going to get a very helpful answer:
“SnappyFingers will never replace the authority websites and web pages,” explains Patel. “It is of use when one wants to find an answer or do quick research. Lets say you come across the phrase Nuclear Medicine in a conversation, and want to know what it is. Which one of these searches would be more useful? – Nuclear Medicine (Google) or Nuclear Medicine (SnappyFingers).”
“We do understand that FAQ’s will never have all the answers,” continues Patel. “Which is why we intend to supplement it with information from other sources.”
When asked what separates SnappyFingers from other answers sites/search engines, Patel simply says, “Quality of search results. That has been our aim since day one.”
Patel would also like people to know that SnappyFingers runs completely in the cloud. “We use various services provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) to power our website and our backend (crawlers, indexers etc).” SnappyFingers currently gets its money from Google AdSense.
