Marchex, a Seattle-based SEO/Pay per click firm headed by folks from Go2Net, has filed to go public. Here's a story on it. This is interesting in many ways – the company is not profitable (though it is cash flow positive), and it's not well known, but it's in the…
* Brainboost, an Ask Jeeves like Q&A engine (employs “cutting edge AI!”) * Think Tank 23 (finds “ideas”) * Nervana. ” You define the context of what you need, and Nervana delivers semantically relevant results from a multitude of sources (such as documents, emails, knowledge communities, intranets, and the Internet). “…
There must be hundreds of these small search-related companies already, with scores more on the brink of launch.
Ho hum. Not as sharp as usual, but a few good points in this Economist piece on the Google IPO. Chief among them is a claim that Google's contextual advertising margins are weak, according to Findwhat's CEO (wishful thinking, perhaps?), and a furtherance of the building meme that Google…
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…
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.
I was in LA Friday, and offline, but even there folks were buzzing about the FT.com report on the Google IPO, which claimed that Google was close to going public, and was seriously considering WR Hambrecht's auction process as its path to the public markets (caveat: The Hambrechts are friends,…
The favorite topic of many a wag in the Valley, the Google IPO has once again been revived, this time by Barrons, and Eric Savitz, no less, The Standard's old EE. Eric is conservative in his reporting of the numbers (I've heard estimates of a hell of a lot more…
Speaking of Tara, here's a good summary of the best tips in her book Google Hacks. Worth anyone reading who uses Google quite a bit. 20 Great Google Secrets….
Saw this thanks to a recent Research Buzz (Thanks Tara)…this is one man's obsession – the Rest of the Web, that huge resource of information that is not digital or not formatted to be crawled….it's called the Deep Web Research Subject Tracer
Many thought (including me) that MSFT would boot Overture as soon as they could once Yahoo bought the company, but not many thought it would take another two years to happen. This is clearly a marriage of convenience, but it points to two realities: one, it creates a timeline: Microsoft…
