January 4, 2008

InfoSpace Seeks Search Engine Market Share

Now that InfoSpace has cleared away other business lines and staff, they just re-committed to online search. The company aims to grow through white-label distribution, which includes over 100 partners so far. In addition, they seek growth through through consumer traffic -- and that strikes me as quixotic at best.

Remember Dogpile? Last summer, this InfoSpace search destination garnered about 0.3% share or under 26 million searches (per Nielsen, July 2007). The company also reported 6.7 million unique monthly visitors worldwide (per comScore, December 2006).

InfoSpace embraces the current search ecosystem, from both organic and paid perspectives. Dogpile has garnered J.D. Power's top satisfaction award for two years running. It's a nice interface that fetches results from Google, Yahoo, MSN Live and Ask engines simultaneously. Beyond the organic search results, InfoSpace has ensured both Google and Yahoo ad sources through 2011.

Yesterday's strategy release mentions “significant product enhancements” and we'll have to wait to hear more. In the meantime, the company touts the benefits of metasearch and non-duplicated results. In their April 2007 study of 19,000 random queries, over 75% of what each engine returned on page-one results was unique. In addition, the first three results returned for these queries didn't overlap at all. Thus unifying and organizing different results seems to be the core value proposition.

So what will drive consumer demand? Well, InfoSpace appointed a new CMO yesterday to figure this out. Bruce Allenbaugh has held top-spots at bigger companies like Safeco and Nextlink. His experience leading marketing at Avenue A, as it went public, seems most relevant because he's been involved in the Search and Search marketing business before. And since he is from the industry, we'd like to know what attracts Bruce to this role.

InfoSpace has such a storied history! Let's see how they do in differentiating their offerings, and balancing between business partnerships and consumer opportunities.

Posted by at 6:30 AM | Permalink

November 14, 2006

InfoSpace Launches Kid-Friendly Search Engine Zoo.com

InfoSpace has launched kid-friendly search engine Zoo.com, which provides web and news search. Intentionally there is no image search at launch. The content comes from Google, Yahoo and Wikipedia with news content from ABC News, Fox News and Yahoo News. Zoo.com uses several methods to screen out adult sites and phrases and doesn't generate results for some queries. For example, a search for "sex" yields zero results.

InfoSpace said it developed the Safari-themed site after conducting considerable research and user testing. Zoo.com is aimed at "tweens" (8 to 13 year olds) who, according to the company, who use the Internet extensively for homework. In research with kids, InfoSpace found that almost half of tweens rely on the Internet as their top information source vs. 29% who use libraries as their number one source.

Ironically, if you do a search for "Kid Friendly Search" on Google, the top sponsored link is for "Adult Friend Finder." Similarly if you conduct a search for pop-singer "Madonna" on Windows Live image search, you'll find what many parents might consider inappropriate content, including nudity and images from her "Sex" book. That's equally true on Yahoo image search. Accordingly, it's very easy for kids to stumble upon adult content without looking for it. And many parents either don't or don't know how to change the porn filters on search engines.

Zoo.com doesn't have any banner advertising but there are commercial links interwoven among the general, organic results. Rod Diefendorf, vice president of local and online search for InfoSpace, explained this approach by saying that paid search results are often equally if not more relevant than organic results, depending on the query.

Zoo.com "competitors" include Yahoo's Yahooligans, AOL's Studdy Buddy and Ask's Ask for Kids. There's also KidsClick!, which is by librarians.

Here's Danny's previous roundup of kid-oriented search engines and porn filtering. There are many more sites is his piece than I've covered above.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 8:33 AM | Permalink

October 20, 2006

WebFetchPro UK Metasearch

WebFetch Pro is a multi/meta search engine creted by InfoSpace and it promises to give you the 'best search results available on the Web'. It attempts to do this by combining the results of the leading search engines (such as Google, Yahoo, Ask MSN and specialised engines for other options) and displaying them for you. It offers tabbed searching for the Web, Images, Audio, Video, News, Business Finder and People Finder, with an option for limiting results to the UK or running an international search.

There is a UK bias to the resource, and the last two options mentioned, Business and People Finder use the Thomson and BT directories respectively. As a result this may affect its international use, but equally increase its appeal for the British market.

The interface is clear, and does what it should do. The results can be displayed by relevance or by search engine, though if the latter is chosen the first 'results' are advertisements from Yahoo and Google - it's necessary to scroll down the page some way to get to the organic results. There is an option on the right hand side 'Are you looking for?' to allow users to focus their searches a little more. Results can be previewed on the results page, more pages can be returned from the site or the user can run the search from one of the engines listed which originally found it.

Exactly what you would expect from a multi or meta search engine, although it was disappointing not to see options for searching blogs, or saving RSS feeds, but perhaps that's being greedy.

However, after having played with the search engine for some time I did feel unsatisfied with the experience. This was due in part to annoying little things, such as the fact that although there was a UK/International option this only seemed to work for Web search and was ignored when I tried to use it for image searching etc. The results page itself was messy, with an emphasis on sponsored results, and the use of colour - 4 different background colours for boxes ('Sponsored results', 'Are you looking for?' 'Results page') and colours for the result title, description, URL, search engine, and 'preview' felt quite garish. At the bottom of the page of results was yet another box of sponsored results however. I appreciate companies need to make revenue and this is the ideal way to do it, but equally they need to remember that they make their money from the users clicking on the links, and by this point I was ready to glaze over.

Search functionality was fine, and it worked perfectly well for simplistic queries, as all multi search engines do. With more complex queries WebFetch Pro was able to limit sending the query to just those search engines that could cope with it, which was a nice touch. No help screen though, which is always a bad sign, or if there was one, I didn't see it, which is just as bad.

What also irritates me, and this isn't a dig specifically at WebFetch Pro, but at all the engines of this type is that they all try and make the point that they are in some way better or superior to single search engines, and that users will get better, 'more comprehensive and relevant results fast' as WebFetch Pro puts it. This may well be the case, but only up to a point, and it's a point that's quickly reached. Any good searcher can create a complex search query for a sophisticated search engine and get superb and accurate results. The same search on an engine of this type is bound to fail since the other search engines queried will either not return a result (in which case I may as well just visit the one engine to begin with) or they will return a result that is incorrect. Search engines are not the same - they have different functionality and different syntax, and that's not about to change any time real soon, so in order to get the most out of them, like it or not, I have to visit them and know their little ways in detail.

Having said that, WebFetch Pro is perfectly adequate for the job it sets out to do, though it is not one that I'll be returning to on a regular basis, but it's worth comparing to any other multi/meta search engine you use just in case you like it better.

Posted by Phil Bradley at 10:23 AM | Permalink

March 28, 2006

Infospace Launches Local Search Beta; Local.com Gets Pay-Per-Call

Infospace has released a new Infospace Local Search site that's in beta. You'll find it here, with a rundown from Gary Price on features here and coverage of the deal from ClickZ in Local.com and InfoSpace Jockey for Local Search Traffic.

The ClickZ article also covers Local.com gaining pay-per-call ads.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:52 AM | Permalink

January 6, 2006

Dogpile Doing Product Placement on Television

Over on Search Engine Journal, Loren posts that Dogpile (they're celebrating their 10th birthday) is doing some "product placement" on various television programs.

His post includes a link to a Seattle Times article (Dogpile is part of Seattle's InfoSpace) says placements have been seen on the season premiere of CBS' "Ghost Whisperer" and the A&E reality show "Growing Up Gotti."

On A&E's "Growing Up Gotti," for instance, Victoria Gotti uses DogPile.com to search Ellis Island records for her great-grandfather.

Perhaps Dogpile's biggest challenge is not only getting people to know about the service but also understand what it offers versus non-meta engines. A few week's ago I mentioned that two of the top five search terms entered into a Dogpile search box in 2005 were Google and Yahoo. As you know, results from both of these engines are already included in Dogpile result sets.

About a year ago, Danny blogged about mentions of A9 and Ask Jeeves on The OC. If memory serves me correctly, an episode of HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm included a shopping bag with the Ask Jeeves logo on it. The Ask Jeeves balloon has also made appearances in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:28 PM | Permalink

December 7, 2005

Infospace Calls On Ingenio for Pay Per Call Partnership

News out of San Francisco and Seattle today that InfoSpace and Ingenio have announced a partnership that will bring Ingenio's Pay Per Call technology to the entire network of Infospace properties including Dogile, MetaCrawler, WebCrawler and Infospace mobile services beginning in Q1 2006.

Mark Barach, Ingenio's Chief Marketing Officer, told Elinor Mills at News.com that customers pay on average $9 to $10 per call.

Ingenio also provides pay per call services for AOL.

From the announcement: The agreement gives Ingenio advertisers broad reach across the entire network of InfoSpace Web properties, in response to consumer search queries. Ingenio advertisers will also be able to reach mobile consumers with distribution across InfoSpace's mobile search applications. InfoSpace provides content and services to every major carrier in North America, reaching 90 percent of U.S. mobile

Complete news release here.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:52 AM | Permalink

September 29, 2005

Infospace & Seekport Announce Partnership as InfoSpace President Leaves Company

Netimperative reports that European engine Seekport and Infospace will partner. The partnership will have Infospace providing paid listings on Seekport results pages.

This has been a busy week for InfoSpace news. On Monday, we blogged about a new mobile search tool that InfoSpace plans to launch in October. Then, on Tuesday, we learned that Kathleen Rae, president and chief operating officer of InfoSpace, will be retiring from the company.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:24 PM | Permalink

September 26, 2005

Infospace Gets Ready to Launch Mobile Search Client

The Seattle Times article: Cellphones emerge as local-search tool, reports on some new mobile search/local search client software that InfoSpace (there's a company we haven't blogged much about recently) and Action Engine will launch in October.

The new product require users to download client software onto their cell phones and then pay for access to the database How much InfoSpace will charge and which wireless carriers will offer access, is unknown.

InfoSpace hopes for a model in which merchants will pay when a user clicks on information about that merchant, said Joe Herzog, InfoSpace's director of emerging products.

The article goes on to say: Herzog said that InfoSpace will not support a model in which advertisers pay to be at the top of the list ? a common practice in PC searches ? because consumers would find that irritating, especially since such listings could clutter the mobile phone's small screen.

Huh? I'm unaware of any major web engine where the advertiser can pay for placement at the top of the organic results. Perhaps the writer should have done a bit more research.

As many of you know I'm the mobile search guy around the SEW Blog and as soon as I can get my hands on the software I'll give it a test and report back. I'm not saying it can't be done but getting the typical cell phone user to first download and then pay for software to access local listings, etc. is going to be an uphill battle for InfoSpace especially when many other companies offer similar services for free via WAP and SMS. More in this news release.

Postscript: If you have a Treo SmartPhone and some models of phones from Kyocera and Samsung, I've found Rick Whitt's Directory Assistant 3.2x client worthy of attention and use. Local listings from YP.com, maps from MapQuest, and more. Directory Assistant 3.2x is donationware.

Posted by Gary Price at 3:33 PM | Permalink

April 18, 2005

MSN Results Coming to InfoSpace Sites

InfoSpace is announcing that they've just inked a two-year deal with Microsoft to add MSN web search results to both their branded metasearch sites (Dogpile, Metacrawler) and their private label search offerings. I just ran a few searches with both engines and it looks like MSN results haven't been added to the mix yet. InfoSpace also has deals in place with Google, Yahoo, and Ask Jeeves.

We've also learned that a new version of Dogpile will be going live at the beginning of May.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:25 PM | Permalink

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