HeyStaks: Improving Search Engine Performance with Social Networking Technology

The HeyStaks technology is being developed by Prof. Barry Smyth's research group, and is the first spin-out of the new CLARITY research centre, a €16m Science Foundation Ireland research centre combining researchers from UCD, DCU and the Tyndal National Institute.

HeyStaks is a new approach to Web search that helps searchers to share their search experiences with friends, colleagues, and other searchers. The HeyStaks browser plugin works with Google to provide users with the ability to create so-called "search staks" as a way to organise and share their Google searches. For example, a group of friends planning a holiday abroad might create a "Holiday 2008" search stak. As they individually search for travel, accommodation and entertainment options, their selections will be shared with each other during future searches as specially highlighted search results. In this way all of the friends can see what results have been found to be useful during earlier searches, which may help them during their own searches for that perfect holiday package. The HeyStaks web site provides a social networking service based on search experiences so searcher can share their search experiences and discover new staks based on their interests.

Research shows that HeyStaks can help searchers find information more quickly, and in turn allow users to create and share many different types of search staks to reflect different topics of interest.

In 2008, HeyStaks won an Eircom’s Web Innovation Fund Award, which is providing the spinout with some initial development money. The idea behind this fund is not only to give a good technology concept the money to get off the ground, but also to push it towards commercialisation and eventually to launch from the Eircom.net platform.

HeyStaks is joint work between Prof. Barry Smyth and two recent PhD graduates, Dr. Maurice Coyle and Dr. Peter Brigs.
Barry has achieved considerable success with previous UCD research spinouts. In 1999 Barry co-founded ChangingWorlds to commercialise personalisation technology in the Mobile Internet sector. Today, ChangingWorlds is a class-leader in the mobile space and employs more than 140 people with offices in Europe, Asia and the US.