Oaddo is an early alpha of a cool new search tool. Imagine that Wikipedia and Pinterest combined to give autocomplete a usability makeover, with Trello acting as the makeup girl. The aim is to help you do deep ‘research search’ when you don’t really know what you’re searching for.

It has an interesting way of allowing your search terms to interact with clustered semantic tags, for drilling down to the best search result. Sort of like a Google autocomplete / autosuggest that’s slowed way down and is largely under your control, and is curated by humans — and as a consequence is not dumb.

Oaddo has a nice clean interface too, which is neatly poised between power and simplicity. The developer Tim Borny has obviously been looking at Trello and Pinterest for inspiration. Although at the moment the discarding of search modifier tags takes two clicks, instead of a fun one-click “fling it to the discard tray” movement.

The other innovation is that it aims to have a democratic user-driven model. That aspect might take Oaddo a long way, provided there’s a critical mass of people — and provided a mechanism can be found to reign in the inevitable SEO spivs, ideological censors, and WikiPolice types.

* Users will ‘vote’ on content, curate content and the database of related terms.

* The community will drive the addition of new features.

So, very interesting. Amid the sea of recent search launches, this is actually one to watch. Here’s Tim Borny’s full explanation…

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCGeIV9NctA?rel=0&w=420&h=315]