Skeptic See Search Overkill

STARTUPS ARE HOPING TO COME UP WITH THE NEXT BIG THING IN SEARCH BUT SKEPTICS SAY GOOGLE WORKS JUST FINE

Red Herring
Feb. 08, 2006

PHOENIX--Next up at Demo: a bunch of search technologies.

With Internet search one of the hottest fields in technology, the number of startups promising new ways to find stuff on the web is exploding, but some skeptics question whether there's truly a demand for all the search newcomers.

"I just don't see the need," said Gary Kayye of Kayye Consulting, referring to the increasingly specialized search offerings provided by many of these firms. "Google works well enough for me." Mr. Kayye was one of many of the attendees at this week's DEMO conference, which gives entrepreneurs an opportunity to show off their wares to venture capitalists. And Mr. Kayye wasn't the only attendee who was skeptical of the search boom.

"There are a lot of recycled ideas," said John Furrier, founder of Podtech.net, which sent out about 80 podcast dispatches from the conference floor in Phoenix. "The companies are a feature to be flipped. They're only incrementally better than existing search."

But Tim Tuttle, who was CEO of video search firm Truveo until AOL bought it last month, said building on a good idea is nothing to be ashamed of (see AOL Buys Video Search Startup).

"If you can have a feature of a $100-billion industry, that's not bad," said Mr. Tuttle. He had been tapped to present at the conference before the deal went through so he altered his presentation to pay homage to his new company's video search initiatives.

Mr. Furrier did call AOL's video search the only example of a "real breakthrough" of the search firms at the conference. And Google, the search leader, lacks many of the features of the DEMO searchers.

Into the Mix
Truveo was one of three DEMO companies tackling multimedia search. Redwood City, Californiabased Riya, which had one of the smoothest stage demos at the packed show, uses facial recognition to perform photo search.

Riya recently fell out of discussions to be acquired by Google or a competitor before settling for a new round of funding (see Riya Captures $15M).

Another search startup, Atlanta-based Nexidia, also gets into artificial intelligence territory by parsing the sounds of words using phonemes like TVEyes' Podscope.

In fact, many of the search startups have ample competition. DEMO's RawSugar offers search that improves based on community annotation-a space filled with companies such as Squidoo, Wink, and Congoo. The conference's BiggerBoat looks a lot like GoFish. And Kaboodle is pretty similar to Wists.

Other DEMO companies are breaking new ground.
San Francisco-based Gravee promises to pay registered web sites if they naturally appear high up in a search. Gravee founder Erik Rannala called the model a way to avoid accusations that the paid search business "leeches" value from the web. The company's "AdShare" pays dividends to web pages and affiliates who sign up for it.

"A novel idea," wrote venture capitalist Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures on his blog. "Although I don't know if sharing the action with the content owners is going to 'disrupt' the web search market at this stage. I'd love to see it happen though."

Positive Feedback
Not everyone in the crowd was pessimistic. Krugle, a vertical search play that doesn't focus on searching for jobs or real estate but rather on searching for open-source code received praise. "That could be really useful," said Evan Rifkin, president of presenter TagWorld. "I always see our programmers searching for code."

Other buzzworthy startups: Kosmix, which sorts the web into categories algorithmically, won acclaim for its technical prowess. Transparensee CEO Steve Lavine entertained a swarm of VCs after his presentation on weighted searches of structured data.

A product that aids search was also a favorite for some. Plum, which rides on the tagline "First you Google, then you Plum," collects searches and anything else from the web or your desktop. It got points for remixing and binding things together rather than asserting its own domain.