Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

"With Yossarian you can increase the diversity and frequency of your Ah ha! moments." Oh really?

Type "beauty" into Google image search, and you'll see endless photos of white models. Search "beauty" in Yossarian, the metaphorical search engine, and it returns pictures of men shaking hands, a little boy dressed as a super hero, and burning money. Keep scrolling and new understandings of "beauty" pop up.

Compared to Google, the results seem random and confusing, but that's Yossarian's benefit, argues its creator J. Paul Neeley. "Google is an incredibly powerful tool, if you know what you're looking for," he told Fast Company. "But it's really problematic in creative terms, if you're trying to generate new ideas.

" Staring at Google's singular view of a given concept doesn't exactly inspire. All queries go through the filter bubble--the algorithms that guess what we want, like Google autocomplete. Filter bubbles, the theory goes, lead to group-think and hinder creativity. And even on Pinterest, a favorite among creative types, the visual representations of ideas tend to converge on one definition.

A search engine that spits out metaphors, like Yossarian, however, can get people thinking about how to define a topic in new and interesting ways. "With Yossarian you can increase the diversity and frequency of your aha moments," the site promises....

Sites that have a high number of social shares, comments, tweets and +1s tend to rank better in Google, according to a new report from Searchmetrics....