There’s an interesting Kickstarter project called Gooey Search, which bills itself as “Google on Steroids with Privacy”. It was developed by a small software company called Visual Purple. The tool comes in the form of an iPad app, as well as a Firefox add-on. I would assume it would be expanded to other platforms, should it reach its funding goal.

Update: Here’s another interesting search engine project on Kickstarter.

Visual Purple’s Megan Rutherford reached out to us to tell us a little about the project. First, check out the video:

“We’ve been building bleeding-edge technology and advanced training simulations for years,” she says. “Recently, we developed and launched a professional data discovery tool for analysts and researchers. The tool is GisterPRO, and does some very powerful things such as read unstructured data – things computers don’t normally like to read.”

“We agonized over finding a way to bring this technology to the rest of us,” she adds. “Then, we stumbled upon Kickstarter.”

“Like most people, Google is our go-to search engine,” the Kickstarter page says. “From our extensive study of the mathematics of language, we found a great way to combine smart web bots and intelligent reading technology. Our technology reads every Google result, strips out the spam, and bubbles up only the best results along with the strongest concepts in a kinetic, Gooey Graph.”

It strips out the spam and bubbles up the best results? Maybe Google should be checking this out as a possible acquisition target, given all the complaints that have been going around regarding the Penguin update.

“Instead of marketing tags, these concepts are discovered entities that empower you to interact with and explore Google results like never before. Gooey makes search fun and rewarding for kids of all ages,” the page continues. “All you have to do is type your search terms into the search bar (just like you would any Google search). We issue your search to Google but our smart bots literally check every result returned – verifying each link and reading each document for you.”

“On the right side of the Graphic User Interface (GUI for short) is Gooey Graph – an alive, real-time network diagram of discovered concepts,” the page explains. “Just play with Gooey Graph by deleting or stacking concepts to quickly sort results and find what you need.”

Rutherford says Gooey Search is designed to bring “professional-grade data discovery technology to the rest of us”.

“The sub-rosa story is that Gooey brings complete privacy, anonymity and automatic entity extraction to Google searches while neutralizing ‘Filter Bubble’ biasing of search results,” she says.

More on the Filter Bubble here.

The Kickstarter page includes the following image used to illustrate how the user can maniplate the “Gooey Graph”:

What do you think?

Gooey will only be funded if it gets $125,000 in pledges by Friday, June 8. So far, it’s attracted 44 backers at $2,380.