Even Google can't think of
everything. A host of start-ups are working to fill niches and capitalize
on the search boom
By Brad Stone
Newsweek
March 29 issue - A Google search for the phrase "apple
tree" draws 2.4 million results, all tucked into an endless, impenetrable
catalog of blue links. Entrepreneur R. J. Pittman thinks that's a few too many.
"Traditional search engines don't solve the information-overload problem," he
says. His Sausalito, Calif., start-up, Groxis, is working on a solution. Its
downloadable software tool, Grokker, sits on the desktop, plugs queries into the
major search engines and uses home-cooked algorithms to analyze the pages and
organize them into categories. Then it renders those categories on the screen in
an easy-to-parse, graphical display of circles and squares. Grokker is available
on the Net for $50 while the company tests a free, ad-supported version. "Search
on the Internet needs to graduate to the next level," Pittman says.
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Groxis isn't alone
in that endeavor. Over the past few years, dozens of start-ups have followed in
the wake of the search giants like the pilot fish that travel with sharks,
hoping to feed on leftovers. Thanks to the success of Google, the search ocean
is now large enough to support many of these smaller life forms. Securities firm
Piper Jaffray predicts global revenue from search engines will grow to $8.9
billion in 2007, up from $2.6 billion today. Though big players like Google,
Yahoo and Microsoft will take the biggest bites, there's still plenty left for
upstarts with unique technologies and fresh approaches. "The exciting thing for
me is that this industry is so young. There's lots of innovation left to be
done," says Eric Matlick, CEO of a two-year-old search-marketing firm called
Industry Brains.
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In
fact, there are so many start-ups entering the search fray these days that to
sort through them you almost need an, umm, search engine. Eurekster, launched in
January, mixes search with social networking, where you make online connections
to friends and business associates, and delivers results based partially on what
those people found useful in their related searches. Another effort, Nutch, is
an open-source search project; programmers around the world freely contribute to
its code. One of its cool planned features is letting searchers tinker with the
parameters of the search algorithm. For instance, they can tell the search
engine to focus only on the number of times a search keyword appears inside Web
pages and to ignore other, possibly irrelevant, factors.
NEWSWEEK RADIO |
3/21/04
Next
Frontiers: Internet Searching, Voting, and Politics
Steven Levy, NEWSWEEK
Technology Columnist, and David Nelson,
Director, National Coordination Office for Information
Technology R & D, National Science and Technology Council,
Executive Office of the President
One
popular objective for new start-ups is tackling the "deep Web," the terabytes of
terrain that exist in the databases of government sites, medical firms and
online stores. By some estimates, these Web pages account for more than 90
percent of the entire Net, but the indexing software robots of the major search
engines like Google have no access to them. Jason Weiner of Chicago-based Dipsie
claims he's cracked the problem; he says the Dipsie crawler gets to all that
hidden content by acting like a human user who is browsing through the database
one page at a time. Dipsie is set to launch later this year. Brightplanet, in
Washington, D.C., has a similar plan, and already serves paying customers like
the South Dakota government, which uses the search technology to let the public
scour state databases. Brightplanet features another nifty innovation: it
remembers the results of each search so an Internet user can build on past
research.
Former
Lycos CEO Bob Davis, now a venture capitalist, says the best opportunities for
new companies are in the area of "search marketing." Yahoo's Overture division
pioneered this business and Google built on it, selling ads across a wide
network of sites. Davis recently invested in New York City start-up Quigo, which
analyzes Web pages much like a search engine, but uses the results to match the
pages with relevant ads. For instance, if a blogger writes about sodas,
automated Quigo software would know to stick a Coke ad on the page. Quigo
technology was initially developed in Tel Aviv.
Another international innovator, Australian Liesl Capper,
launched her start-up, Mooter, last October; it tries to decipher the implicit
meaning of a search—whether someone is looking for election results or vacation
rentals when searching for the word "Italy," for example. "People keep asking
me, why do we need another search engine?" Her answer: "Finding information is a
basic human need. We need to keep doing the job better, with less pain all
around." Dozens of other entrepreneurs are all swimming in the same direction.
