Booble
On some level, you have to love this: A porn search engine. If only it worked. I crashed it on a search for "sex," tried again, and got 291 results - 291! Don't even try more sophisticated fare, there are few results to speak of. It's a great idea, poorly executed, and with a terrible name - Booble - that's derivative *and* sophomoric. The lawyers over at Google must be sharpening their knives, because the trade dress ripoffs alone warrant a bigfoot letter, if not more. Booble's put out a press release, lightheartedly claiming they are parodying Google, but they also claim the engine actually works. It's a directory of sorts - the release claims they've added 6000 sites that are vetted by human editors, but ...really. Note to Fleshbot: This is a good idea poorly executed - get on this asap!
(Thanks to the folks at Boing Boing for the pointer).
Comments
John,
This site rocks. It's much better than yours!
Your blog is not better than your magazine was.
XO,
Steve
While I agree Booble's site is poorly executed, maybe because it was developed in a few days, their PR is well executed but as sleazy as their porn.
Designed with a striking resembleance to Google, a new pornography search engine was launched on January 20. Booble.com was hit with so much traffic just 24 hours after its launch that its servers went down temporarily, trying to serve over 100,000 requests. How was this “marketing success” achieved?
Remember MikeRoweSoft vs Microsoft. Microsoft conceded that it may have taken its trademark rights “a little too seriously” in pursuing the 17-year-old Canadian high school student and settled amicably. The settlement followed a crush of international publicity, much of it casting Microsoft as Goliath vs. Rowe as David, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of visitors to MikeRoweSoft.com.
One week later, Booble appears sending press releases positioning itself to be the David in a fight against Google, which it claims it merely wants to parody.
But Booble’s founder is no Mike Rowe. Booble’s founder has an established sister porn site, Sir Rodney.com. Mike Rowe was also not earning money from everyone of click as Booble/SirRodney does. Unlike Mike Rowe, Booble’s founder is too embarrassed to give his name because he does not want to be associated with porn, while at the same time mocking Google for not wanting to be associated with his porn.
I have never been a fan of large companies over aggressively enforcing their trademark rights a position I have stated in my eBook on business domain names, at http://www.seemly.com. But in this case, it’s likely that Booble intentionally got itself into this trademark mess for the publicity and is a disgrace to legitimate trademark difficulties such as MikeRoweSoft.
A harmless publicity stunt? Not to Google’s image or legal costs.
I agree, Booble was a cool idea but horribly executed. There are a few sites since then which actually *work*. I think the two most popular are EveKnows and AskJolene, though I'm sure there are others.
Leave a comment