Yet another pretender to the throne, Mooter.com is a new search engine out of Australia. It uses clustering technology – not a new idea – but claims to have made it better. I tried it (quite cursorily) and it was, well, not awful. Scattered reports say the site sometimes fails to return results, but that hasn’t stopped the Mooter CEO from saying they plan to go public on Google’s coattails. At least she’s being honest. According to a local news story on the IPO, Mooter has no profits. And if you hit their site and poke around, they sound darn flaky. From their Mission Statement:
As we move, as we track through the information now presented, as our brains cavort along their apparently random paths, increasingly powerful technologies will anticipate our needs. ….We must keep thinking. About who we really are. About what we really want. We must have a powerful tool for finding our way around the information world: a tool that does not impose value on us, but helps us find our own meaning.
If we do not, the mutated survivors will be the corporations who have managed the most manipulation, not the beauty of the human spirit in all its fierce joy of living and intensity of love for self and other sentients.
We must be mindful of what we plant, our children will bear the fruits.
Dude, pass the bong. It’s sophomore year again.
And if they do go big time, they gotta do something about the logo. It looks like the mascot for a cold medication.
That is the funniest mission statement I have ever read! Thanks for the find, John. Which searches did you try, by the way?
I tried a few old standards – for me anyway. The search I know best is of course the vanity search (“John Battelle”), after that, I tried “google IPO” and “how Mooter works”. All turned up less than stellar results. I am not sure how this site plans to compete. But maybe we’ll hear from them…I’m increasingly thinking this site does not merit the attention we’re giving it here…!