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Bill Gross is an innovator in the search engine space and the brains behind Go-To.com which became Overture and was sold to Yahoo. He founded the whole pay-per-click search engine advertising model. When he creates something new in the space, it is worth looking at. On Tuesday October 5th, Bill Gross announced the beta launch of Snap.com, a new search engine and advertising model. Snap.com focuses on 3 major changes for the user experience: 1. User Control – The searcher gets to change the order of search results, refine search results instantly, and hone in on exactly what you’re looking for. 2. User Feedback – Snap.com takes into account what happens after people click on search listings at snap.com and others, to use as feedback on the relevance, and get you better results up at the top. Their goal is to help users avoid dead end searches, and saves time. Their goal is to figure out, based on millions of users, what people are really looking for so they can put custom formats on search pages where previous users signaled their “intent” by their follow-on searches. 3. Transparency – They plan to reveal every action and transaction at the site, so you know what we are doing and what other users are doing. They will even reveal their revenues. They think that users get better results because transparency prevents advertisers or others from gaming the system. On the advertisers side, there are some changes too. The advertiser signup form indicates that you can buy advertising based on any one of the following models: When you visit snap.com the first thing that jumps out at you is information about what is going on with their company. They show the top 10 products, people and music that people are currently searching for. They show how many searches have been performed this week along with graphs of the number of page views, visitors, searches, and advertisers. They even list the top sites referring people to their site. Interesting information... The real changes appear when you actually conduct a search for products like digital cameras, they actually pull a product finder result set above the web search information, bringing product data feeds to the top. This information can quickly be sorted and filtered every which way, price, zoom factor, storage, lcd, size, etc… When you get down to the “normal” search results, they are anything but normal. Company logo’s appear on the left hand side and search results include scores and the sort and filter results based on rankings for local and web based popularity and satisfaction scores. You can even sort / filter your results based on .com extensions (tld’s) What do all the new columns mean: The search engine is still in Beta, and a search result for Halloween Costumes shows some signs of what may be wrong. Yahoo and AOL logo’s appear along with web popularity and satisfaction scores for Yahoo and AOL's main sites for sites that are stores or personal pages owned by others who happen to be hosted off Yahoo and AOL's main domain names. Somehow I doubt store.yahoo.com/instylekids.com/halcost1.html is as popular as AOL.com. But tell that to Snap... Overall the user experience is cool. I am not sure if the average user will take advantage of all the sorting and filtering capabilities, but it's nice to have them at your fingertips. The question will be if they can generate enough user demand on their site to draw the advertising dollars. You might also see them license their technology to one of the major search engines - this is what happened with Bill's original company. Only time will tell. Comments (0) + TrackBacks (0) | Category: SEM Company & Industry News
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Adam Viener
