“Get Where You Want In Two Clicks”

Dipsie, a new search engine coming Summer 2004, was recently written up in Businessweek (two paragraphs, with no mention of who was behind it). I could not find the site using a Google search (or Alta Vista or Teoma, so hold the conspiracy theories), but found it by simply typing in “dipsie.com.” Gee…that seems odd, or they are so new that they’ve not been crawled, or…they have banned spiders from their site.

The site is very light on details, though it does say they are privately funded, in Chicago, and they are hiring. In the Businessweek piece (I’d link to it but their online site is deeply f*cked up) they also claim they will index 10 billion web pages (Google et al do about 3 billion) and will have semantic ranking (language based) that will be better than Google (the motto is “Get Where You Want In Two Clicks”.) If that’s right, expect them to be bought soon. If they *really do* have great tech, tech that can scale and withstand serious slashdotting, they’ll lash themselves to the mast, ignore the siren call of easy money from Google, MSFT, or Yahoo, and launch. Their price will go up with every new user they pull in. As Eric at Google often points out, the competition is one click away. And as great as Google is, fact is, no one ever gets past what Tim Bray calls the “Google Event Horizon” – result # 1001. In fact, few get past result #10 in any search engine, and therein lies an opportunity.