Written on April 11, 2008 – 11:02 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Most European search markets are dominated by Google and there seem to be no real local competitors. In Russia however, a fierce battle for the search query’s of the consumers is going on. Yakov Sadchikov from Quintura even mailed me that “the Russian search engines are coming.” Well, I don’t think they will cross any borders, since their main advantage is the local knowledge and adaption to the Cyrillic alphabet. But they sure give Google a hard time on Russian soil.
Yandex CEO Arkady Volozh
First there is Russia’s largest search engine Yandex, the first engine that revealed a billion pages outside the .ru domain. According to ComScore, Yandex is the no. nine search engine globally. They’ve launched their first vertical search engine, Yandex.Auto. A search engine for, you guessed it right, car classified ads. The crawler indexes over half a million listings of used cars from 30 Russian car sites. Search query’s can be specified by gearbox type, brand, color and whatnot. Yakov showed me an example of the results for Lamborghini.
Secondly, the search engine that comes right after Yandex is Rambler. They’re not in the world’s top ten yet, but are doing a good job with 300 million monthly searches and more than 37 million unique users in last February. Revenues of 2007 increased with 125% from 2006 to 69 million dollars.
So this upcoming engine has released a new version which is open to the public on beta.rambler.ru. The differences with the current version are mainly visual, also the focus of Rambler has shifted to vertical search. So there’s a thumbnail next to a search result and four categories - Internet, Top 100, News and Wikipedia - are marked with different colors.
It seems like the Russian search engines are doing the opposite of what Google does, since they’re adding fancy add-ons, while Google still keeps it clean and simple. Maybe they’re right, maybe it’s time for specified and vertical search. Most of us are somewhat used to the complexity of the Web now, so we might as well be able to handle a search engine a bit more complicated than just a white page.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on March 8, 2008 – 12:16 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Quintura, a visual-based search engine for browsing and discovery-type search launched its search engine for search on individual web-sites and blogs. When entering a search term, Quintura shows a cloud with related tags. Search blog AltSearchEngines already installed the engine their sidebar. After trying it for a while, I definitely see the use of this visual search option. Time for an interview with the co-founder, President and CEO of Quintura Yakov Sadchikov.
Of course, I asked him why visual search is the future. “The visual-based search is more intuitive and easy to use. Making a parallel here, iPhone is an example of a visual-based user interface that is taking smart phone market by storm. Look at Quintura as an iPhone for the search market.” That’s quite statement, as there are more visual search engines appearing, like ManagedQ.
The search experience it totally different though. ManagedQ loads full screen and shows screenshots combined with tags in a sidebar. Quintura however keeps it simple and just shows tags. Smart move, since the clouds of Quintura can be easily installed on blogs and sites. That has two major advantages: the chance that Quintera will get viral is bigger and it makes a pretty good business model. Right?
Sadchikov: “We can educate the market about new search experience that Quintura brings and start creating a web index and monetizing it straight away. We now have 1,000 web-sites and blogs that joined our site search program. It includes portals with a monthly traffic of several million users. All those sites and blogs that embed Quintura site search widget are actually Quintura advertising network since we plan to start selling graphical ads in the widget’s search cloud. We expect a number of affiliates to grow to 10,000 by the end of 2008.”
That sure sounds good, yet I doubt whether Quintura will be successful in non English-speaking countries. The problem with the visual search engine is it doesn’t handle other languages than English*. When I search in either French of German, tags like ‘through’ or ‘the’ are popping up. So, just like the iPhone, we’ll have to wait a while before Quintura gets really useful in Europe.
(By the way, today is women’s day. So the guys from Quintura created a women-specific search engine. Ladies, please let us know what you think)
*Update: Charles Knight from AltSearchEngines mailed me that Quintura also handles Russian.
Written on January 23, 2008 – 9:49 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
“Yahoo hasn’t given up on search yet”
Yahoo, maybe in an effort to distract us from the massive layoffs coming up next week, has just announced that they have updated their crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. In case you didn’t know, Yahoo hasn’t given up on search yet and has a decent search engine itself. The update is taking some time which means that we may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index. So far, nobody is complaining yet.
“most of these names are completely unfamiliar”
And then there are all the other Google alternatives that have news. Russian based Quintura was recently named named the Alternative Search Engine of the Year by AltSearchEngines.com. The interesting thing about this list is that most of these names are completely unknown to most of us. Here is a list of 100 search engines who work day and night to become the Google Killer but they can’t seem to make an impression. As the author of the article mentions “At the beginning of 2007, the five major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL and Ask) had at least 95% of the search “pie” (it could be as much as 98.3%). At the end of 2007, the same five major search engines, with slight individual changes, still had at least 95% of the search “pie.””. So, as expected, search is a damn hard market to enter.
Techcrunch reports about Twingly, a Swedish company launching in a month or two, which will focus solely on european blog search. I have met the founders of Twingly at Le Web last year and we will do a more detailed interview with them once they actually launch and there is news to report.
“Google lost a whopping $40 Billion in market cap”
Oh, and entering the search market is damn hard but staying there can be tough too. Google lost a whopping $40 Billion in market cap since its stock reached a $747 high in early November. Today it lost another $37.95 (or 6.49%) and is currently hovering around $540. I guess being the number one search engine in the world isn’t all peaches and cream either.
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