SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - July 14, 2010) - PeerPong, the largest index of expertise on the Web, today announced dramatic growth of its PeerRank Index, enabling the identification of the best people to answer any question on the Web. PeerRank is a dynamic index with currently more than 4 million people across the Web, steadily expanding by more than 1 million each month. This growth coincides with a 600% increase in PeerPong's user base since the company's June 2010 Beta launch.
Peerpong's PeerRank technology, which determines a numerical weighting for a person's knowledge and expertise, is created using proprietary semantic, natural language processing (NLP) indexing algorithms. The technology combines a massive ontology of "n-grams," that learns to associate a number of key terms, categories and current trends, among other variables. The PeerRank technology can define, assign and rank people by key term, category and a number of other distinguishing characteristics, such as location.
The PeerRank includes registered PeerPong users, but more importantly, it can incorporate anyone with a public online presence. Currently, PeerRank is based on Twitter feeds and opt-in Facebook profile information, and will soon incorporate any number of social and professional data feeds for an expansive and powerful ranking index.
"PeerRank has the unique ability to draw from a comprehensive understanding of peoples' presence on the Web, and therefore is able to better identify their demonstrated areas of interest and knowledge," said Ro Choy, PeerPong CEO. "PeerRank supports PeerPong's goal of finding the best person for any subjective query, rather than focusing on a fast response or a 'best' answer."
For its free consumer service, PeerPong's matching engine uses its PeerRank technology to query against any question or search term for an ordered list of the most relevant people related to it. Because of PeerRank's massive scale, PeerPong is able to find people who have demonstrated interest across a huge variety of categories and route them towards the most relevant questions and answers.
For example, Sharon Choe is a PeerPong expert and foodie with endless knowledge on the best dining spots in San Francisco, as well as other activities the city has to offer. In response to a question about recommendations on tourist attractions for a first-time visitor to San Francisco, Sharon helpfully suggested a restaurant and dessert spot, a handful of museums, a used book store and a bike ride across Golden Gate Bridge. Due to Sharon's depth of knowledge around San Francisco, she was an ideal person for imparting the handy advice.
PeerPong's PeerRank technology also incorporates a recommendation and badging system that makes it easy for users to weigh in on whether knowledgeable people are experts. PeerPong doesn't rely on friends of friends or subjective perspectives to deliver an answer in the name of speed, or crowd-sourcing to find an arbitrary "best" answer. Instead, PeerPong looks for the best person for a specific question, based on their demonstrated interests and prior answers, and empowers and incentivizes knowledgeable people in a variety of ways to encourage them to share their expertise.
About PeerPong
PeerPong is the world's largest index of expertise. The free service makes it fun and easy to find the right person to answer any question. PeerPong's PeerRank is constantly improving and growing, indexing people based on their publicly demonstrated interest. Learn more about PeerPong and its approach to providing expert answers on the PeerPong blog at http://blog.peerpong.com/.
The company has raised $2.8 million from investors including First Round Capital, Charles River Ventures, Partech and DCM.
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