I’m not sure if TechCrunch’s screen grab of a search result for Wikia’s potential Google killer is legit or not, but it’s a results page for Toyota Camry, I could not help but compare search results for Toyota Camry and see which one was best:
- From Wikia Search (via TechCrunch) - you only see the Top 3 results.
- From MetaMojo.com (this is our domain-specific, vertical search engine)
- From Google
- From AOL - this puppy returned no [organic] results (?)
- From MSN
- From Ask
- From Yahoo!
The only thing I’ll say is that our budget is a fraction of theirs, and ALL of the results are essentially similar. If one better, sure, but that depends on the individual user and what that person is looking for at the time, “relevance is subjective.”
I am very impressed and happy with MetaMojo.com’s result, and I feel that auto is not even our best category, I tend to like music, health quite a bit.
I’ll also say that ours is the best at vertical, contextual result, and if indeed 2007 is a year when vertical search is to take off, then we’re well positioned. I personally welcome more innovation. I have been working on a lot of bells and whistles and we’ll be rolling them out over the next weeks. I do not really think anyone would cease going to Y! or G and come to MetaMojo, I simply think it’s a good piece of our overall company’s portfolio; at the very most, it sure is complementary to what the major search engines are doing.
Anyway, good luck Jimbo, if you intend on “killing Google,” you will need it.
If nothing else, competition is always a good thing and this only improves search results, which are always hit or miss depending on your state of mind.
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WatchMojo NewsletterNewTeeVee reports some changes at Guba, who’s been around since 1997. Or 1998, according to their About Us.
Founded in 1998, GUBA is a leading online entertainment destination helping users browse, download, share and buy user-generated content and hundreds of movies and TV shows. GUBA enables rapid download to the PC, iPod, PSP, and other portable devices. Users can watch videos in Flash, QuickTime, Windows Media formats, and can stream videos in their home network using Windows Media Center and Apple’s Front Row technology.
In compliance with the DMCA, GUBA accepts user-generated video in all common formats and indexes content from areas of the Internet that major search engines do not search.
Major Hollywood studios, distributors and independent film makers alike use GUBA to seamlessly reach one of the fastest growing audiences on the Internet. GUBA protects content owners using the latest DRM solutions and a proprietary, MPAA-approved filtering technology named “Johnny.”
Hmm… 1997-98. I was midway through my finance degree then; I don’t think I even thought I’d be working online at the time, let alone eventually become a major producer of original video content.
I like to “keep it real” by admitting and pointing these things out, instead of pretending like I created the Web or began playing with computers when my mom was busy changing my diapers, which incidentally, Guba’s co-founder and CEO Tom McInerney was doing, according to the company bio. Apparently, McInerney is leaving the firm to “write a book” and basically, get out of day-to-day operations of the firm. Hey man, if I’d be doing something since 1997, I’d feel the same way.
This comes after a shakeup at Revver which saw two of the three co-founders leave the company. In all likelihood, these two events have nothing to do with one another, but we’ve already said that backers of online video file sharing sites like Revver and Guba will feel the squeeze in the wake of GooTube consolidating its place atop the market.
We all know Alexa is dubious, but the Pageview, Rank and Reach graphs suggest a slowdown.
Anyway, whatever the case here, McInerney - who saw the big picture all the way back in 1997 - should have no problem getting back up on his feet and finding something to keep him busy.
When the labels filed a $1.65 trillion lawsuit, it sounded a lot like Donald Trump’s claim this week that “he’s worth many billions,” in other words: ridiculous.
The thing that really shocks me is that this pretty much had G-R-E-E-D written all over it. To ask for $1.65 trillion is greedy. But what is more emblematic of the labels’ greed is that their greed did not allow them to think of creating their own Napster, allowing Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker to create Napster and serve over 50M users… Napster was somewhat pioneering for what it did with a P2P (peer to peer) architecture. Of course, with AllofMP3.com - the Russian based music site - the element of pioneering is that they simply charge based on bandwidth. According to Wikipedia:
Unlike some US-based music stores such as Apple’s iTunes Music Store, AllOfMP3 charges for the volume of data downloaded, not for individual songs. As of August 13, 2006, the basic price for downloaded music is $0.03 per megabyte, increased from the previous $0.02 per megabyte set on January 15, 2005. As a basis of comparison, a typical four-minute, 128 kbit/s song downloaded from the iTunes Music Store would cost $0.99, whereas this same song at the same bitrate would cost $0.12 to download at AllofMP3.com.
This price is often reduced by a complicated system of discounts based on cumulative usage, promotions, and type of payment. These discounts can reduce the effective price of downloads by up to one third of the original cost.
They remove the nonsense of media and simply charge for the cost of goods sold. Can you imagine if publishers sold books strictly based on the cost of paper, ink and added a basic markup instead of the myriad of voodoo variables that goes into the pricing of a book?
The point is: AllofMP3.com is a simple but intuitive pricing models that the labels could have pushed themselves, since their cost of delivering music online really would have been driven by bandwidth costs. Instead, their reluctance to get with the times highlights their greed more than their reaction to fear: to sue ALLofMP3.com.
See our Head-to-Head Search Results: WikiaSearch (Wikiasari), Google, MetaMojo, Ask, AOL, MSN, Yahoo!.
This is interesting, the site is not live, but considering it involved Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, it’s worth noting. The odd thing is that Amazon.com dropped A9, yet Wales’ search engine will ”launch with Amazon.com”:
Jimmy Wales told The Times of London his search engine, planned to launch with Amazon.com, will use the same user-based technology as Wikipedia. The commercial version of the search engine will be developed through San Mateo, Calif.-based Wikia Inc., with a provisional launch planned for the first quarter of 2007, he said.
Wikiasari gets its name from ‘wiki,’ Hawaiian for ‘quick,’ and ‘asari,’ Japanese for ‘rummaging search.’
Earlier this year Wales said he secured multimillion-dollar funding from Amazon.com and a separate cash infusion from a group of Silicon Valley financiers to finance Wikia projects.
Read more here. Amazon.com is investing in many non-linear areas, so it’s not a safe assumption to think that this search will be related to A9 or Amazon.com’s [traditional] core business. However, since Wales launched Wikia, essentially a vertical, category-focused Wiki-based community, you can imagine that Wikiasari.com will be somewhat related to Wikia’s core… otherwise, no matter how much investors believe and trust Mr. Wales, they will have some issue with the conflicting focus. It’s worth nothing that on Wikipedia.org’s Wikia page, there is a mention that: “Wikiasari (previously called Wikia) was an earlier project run by Wales that attempted to create a copyleft search engine.”
I have copied Mr. Wales to get some info. Will keep you posted.
UPDATED: from Mr. Wales:
“The story is correct in the core, but confusing people as to Amazon’s involvement. Amazon is not directly involved in the project at all. They are an investor in Wikia.”
Disclosure: we run MetaMojo.com, which too is a vertical, category based search engine.
See our Head-to-Head Search Results: WikiaSearch (Wikiasari), Google, MetaMojo, Ask, AOL, MSN, Yahoo!.
This past week marked a plethora of end of year lists predicting what will take off in 2007, and on all of those lists was RSS, or Real Simple Syndication.
Along with these lists, came an application by Microsoft to patent RSS, from CNET News:
Microsoft has filed for two patents covering technology used to organize and read syndicated Web feeds, such as those delivered via the widely used Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, family of formats.
Naturally, with it came the usual outrage, defending and accompanying noise, trackbacks, comments etc. Mind you, I might lose some “street cred” here from the IT folks who read this (though my forte is definitely on the business side of the fence, not the IT one), one good thing about this is it led me to research the history of RSS. For one, I had no idea who Dave Winer was (yes, that says more about me than he…), so that line of researching led me to unearth a lot of interesting facts.
Alas, finally, one man (Niall Kennedy) goes through the arduous task of reading the application itself (gee, what a novel idea) and explains in somewhat layment terms what the deal is.
A little side note: as blogs develop and take on their own macro-identity in the publishing landscape, each blogger also finds their niche, or calling. It’s nice to see Niall Kennedy follow up in his-depth analysis of Digg’s potential achilles heel with this in-depth look at Microsoft’s patent application. I sure don’t want to say anything bad about anyone else, but I find a lot of blog posts are light on substance, just a rehash of what is said elsewhere, a link to and back, so when I see a nice meaty piece, I can’t help but tip my hat. I sometimes feel guilty when I blast out a 1,000+ word post on something, or a long analysis on a given topic, but when I see Kennedy’s style, I realize that this is exactly why blogging has amn interesting place in the future of publishing, news, commentary, analysis and reporting.
UPDATE: MSFT’s response (Don Dodge’s response does not count, in the sense he is not part of the RSS or legal team). Is that humility I detect in MSFT’s tone? God bless Google… now if someone can come and humble Google… we’re kidding, we love Google, even when they steal our idea. We’re just kidding, doubt it was “our” idea and surely, imitation is the nicest form of flattery.
A week after Google dropped support for its SOAP API, Yahoo! doubles up its efforts to get developers to build search apps on its API. I have relinked, below, some of our previous posts on experiences using Yahoo!’s API from March 2005-November 2006 to plan, build and run MetaMojo.com, the domain specific vertical search engine, and why we swapped out Yahoo! for our own index and crawler, using open source search software on a LAMP stack:
- Google’s SOAP Search API Shutdown: A Lesson for Entrepreneurs
- Yahoo!’s Credibility Problem with Geeks (or, why we stopped using Y!’s API, and they did not care)
- Official Launch of Domain Specific, Vertical Search Engine MetaMojo.com
- Google Borrows Page from MetaMojo.com (Really!)
Just a week ago, I noticed that Wikipedia began a fundraising drive, and it had about $50K raised. Then by the beginning of this week, it crossed $100K. And now, by week’s end: $250K.
Not bad.
Maybe we were premature in asking how much Wikipedia would be worth as a for profit and in fact, might be better off avoiding ads. After all, today Wikipedia is having a clever “promotion” - an anonymous person will match all donations.
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