More Ways to Search

March/April 2007 Issue: Page 74

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Google still dominates search, but there are some new search engines bubbling up.

Search powerhouse Google has ascended not only to the No. 1 starting place for most Web searches, but the name has become part of the popular consciousness, even spawning the use of its name as a verb. To Google is to discover the globe.

That's all about to change and the world of search is about to bust wide open.

Not to say that the top three search engines – Google, Yahoo and MSN – will topple. Far from it. But there are search technologies that have recently launched and some just on the horizon that aim to give searchers new ways to find what they want, especially in niche areas.

The recent growing popularity of video search and search via mobile phones are just the beginning of innovations to come. Some predict that search by image, natural language search and search by speech are the next improvements to the search experience.

As sophisticated as Google is at what they do, it is still an engine that relies on text – text is matched with text and results come from weighing the quality of the potential matches with the text you submitted. And there is slowly growing dissatisfaction with the relevancy of search results. A survey by Outsell stated that "search failure due to irrelevant results" of Google users grew from 28 to 30 percent in the last two years.

Start-up companies have perceived an opportunity to look beyond text search. And some companies believe they have novel methods for using text search to get more specific results.

Beyond Text

Moving completely away from text, Riya – based in San Mateo, Calif. – recently launched Like.com, what it calls a visual shopping search engine. The engine recognizes likenesses – in faces and in clothes, shoes and jewelry – based solely on visual cues. "In some cases words work just fine for search," says Riya CEO and co-founder Munjal Shah. "But take a tie or jewelry pattern. There are things [for which] words fail us. We introduce the photo as your search start."

Riya isn't just going to help you shop for clothes. Using their technology will help families with Flickr accounts organize their vast digital photo albums by allowing users to "train" the Riya system to get better at recognizing people photos and to know when similar faces do not belong with your albums.

Perhaps most importantly, Shah says they now have a business model to go along with the cool technology. "Look inside the photo search paradigm," he says. "The way it makes money is questionable. Face recognition software isn't going to make much money. But now we have CPA from some merchants and CPC from some merchants."

Part of their push is to get merchants to upload high-resolution images since better-quality pictures allow Riya to better differentiate the details of a belt buckle taken from a full-body shot.

With this model, Shah says that he isn't in the business of competing with Google, but rather any other visual search engine to come. "Our belief is that it is too hard to win [with text]," he says. "We want to think off the map. That big of a paradigm shift is needed."

Right now Riya is sticking with soft goods – a $30 billion sector – but Shah doesn't rule out furniture, garden or china patterns eventually. He's decided soft goods are the "beachhead." They also have a mobile application that is coming soon and right now people can search Flickr photos of people using Riya's technology.

Shah is thrilled that the technology is regarded as cool, but is continuing to look for revenue streams. "I've changed strategies once; I'll change it again," he says.

No Searching in Tongues

Still in extreme beta but looking to launch a public beta in 2007, Powerset, based in Palo Alto, Calif., is a natural language search engine. Barney Pell, CEO, sets it up like this: If you put a stream of text into a search engine, the engine will only find the same characters, he says. "It forces people to do their work on the computer's terms. You have to figure out what the right terms are for your search." He says that you are out of luck if you use the words in the wrong way.

Pell says, "Natural search is a complete mess." You spend a lot of time just trying not to be a spammer, he notes. "The sites that are winning are not the ones that have the best message or solution." He says the Powerset engine reads all Web pages and matches all words for context, not just keywords. "It can tell the difference between optimized search engine babble and content," he says. He adds that a ranking on Powerset will rise by focusing on the quality of your site

. Marketers, he says, will love it because advertisers won't have to anticipate the words people will use. Pell says that for Hawaiian handbags, for example, a user may type in "Hawaiian bags" or "tropical bags" and still not find what they want. "There's a whole industry around trying to guess the right words and at what price," he says, adding that with Powerset, marketers won't have to get up every morning and decide which words to buy that day.

Early adopters will get dramatically better results, he says, because the public beta will probably involve a tool where you can submit according to organized categories and submit to the engine in advance. This way, users can help define the context before the engine officially launches.

Making Search a Snap

While some technologies are focused on the back end, others want to change how the users view search results. Launched in the middle of 2006, Snap.com wants to take advantage of the pervasiveness of broadband to bring the user a more detailed search experience. Continued on Page 2...

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