Researchers in Dublin have won a prestigious European entrepreneurship competition for their new way of organising search results on the Web.
HeyStaks Technologies, a campus spin-off company at University College Dublin, has developed a revolutionary social Web search platform which enables searchers to better organise and share the resources they find while searching and browsing the Web.
The Irish company won the inaugural UNICA Entrepreneurship Competition for Students and Young Researchers and a prize of €20,000. HeyStaks competed against teams from UNICA’s network of 42 universities in “Dragons’ Den” style presentations at the final in Paris.
Page from a HeyStaks booklet explaining how the technology works
What HeyStaks does
Dr Maurice Coyle and Dr Peter Briggs of HeyStaks Technologies
Finding relevant information quickly and efficiently is a key requirement in internet search engines.
But one problem with today’s major engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing is that they have a “one-size-fits-all” approach and don’t take into account the differing needs of individual users and the context of a user’s search.
For example, they don’t recognise that a friend or colleague of the searcher may have already done all the hard work already by finding the required information.
HeyStaks adds a layer of collaboration and organisational features on top of existing search engines, so that users can share their “staks” of search results.
The “social re-ranking” technology was developed by company co-founders Peter Briggs and Maurice Coyle while they were studying for PhDs at UCD’s School of Computer Science and Informatics.
Their company is based at NovaUCD, the innovation centre which commercialises inventions arising from UCD research.
Learn more
Find out more about HeyStaks – and download a cartoon-style booklet about how it works
