Written on April 21, 2008 – 5:19 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
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The first guys I met here are Josh and Sum from the young and enthusiastic team of eeggi. They drove six hours from LA to arrive here 7am sharp. And they had all the reason to do that, since they’ve quite an interesting search engine to present. 
They claim it’s the world’s first mathematically-based Search and Retrieve, Response, and Discovery engine (ReDi engine), capable of focusing on the concept of text and not just the text itself”.
So basically, if you searched for an “exciting dvd”, the results would probably also include “breathtaking movie” or “thrilling film”. It reminds me of the iStockphoto’s search engine, that asks you what the meaning of your ambiguous search terms is. Only eeggi will find that out itself.
After five years of protecting and patenting, the guys from eeggi are now ready to “play”. It only took them three months to develop the prototype, which will launch in open beta in a few months. Josh McMillin, the CFO, told me that they’re going in a total different direction than the other alternative search engines. Sounds promising, let’s see how it turns out.
[reported live from the AltSearchEngines event]
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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