• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, December 6, 2011

A team of engineers led by Italian researcher and computer scientist Massimo Marchiori will launch the next-generation search engine dubbed Volunia. The engine will debut initially in a dozen languages. In a video uploaded to YouTube, he explains: "It's a different perspective -- not just another classic search engine," pointing to Google. "It's a new radical view of what a search engine of the future could be," he said.

Marchiori, an associate professor at Padua University, is credited with developing HyperSearch. The results are based on how single page queries rank, as well as how single pages rank in relation to the Web. That concept contributed to the development of Google's search algorithm. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin presented the idea -- now known as PageRank -- in a paper at a conference in 1996, citing his work.

The "different Web experience" took about three years to build. Marchiori tweets in a Twitter post that the engine will launch in the year XI. Three sets of numbers appear on the company's Web site. Two floating numbers suggest an uncertain day and month for the launch, all depending on the success of beta tests.  

Few clues have been given about what the search engine will look like, but one video on the company's YouTube page begs the question of whether it will support social signals and offer social services. The video, titled "A different way: greeting," shows people going about their daily business, sometimes stopping and waving to another person and other times to an open sea. It will be interesting to see whether the signs or signals in the video represent services in the engine.

Today, Marchiori is part of the research staff in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.