May 15, 2006

Snap.com's New User Interface & Adds New Features

Snap.com has released a new user interface for its search results page. As you begin typing your query, it does the whole Google Suggest, LookAhead, AllTheWeb LiveSearch auto complete suggested query thing. Then you submit your query and the interface snaps (literally) into a two column view. On the left are the search results and on the right is a preview of the landing page of the result selected on the left. This is a more, in your face approach to Ask.com's Binoculars, that allows you to mouse over to see a site preview. For the full release, download the PDF document.

Postscript From Danny: See also Upstart search engine blurs the lines of advertising from the Associated Press, which covers issues raised over whether Snap is doing proper disclosure of paid listings. Meanwhile, Overture Founder Starts Pay-Per-Action System from the San Jose Mercury news covers the move to a cost-per-action payment system for ads.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:27 AM | Permalink

July 19, 2005

What's New at Snap.com

Michael Liedtke's AP story: Snap.com Plans to Combat 'Click Fraud', offers a look at what Bill Gross and Snap.com are up to these days including news that the company has just secured more than $10 million in venture capital funding.

Quick takes from the article:

+ ``We feel there is so much more innovation that can take place in search,'' Gross said Monday. ``It's hard to say that little Snap will ever beat Google, but I think we can become a viable alternative.''

+ Gross is among those who believe click fraud is a big problem. He aims to change things with a ``cost per action'' system that only charges ad commission when a purchase is actually completed. ``I believe the commercial side of search will evolve toward cost-per-action in the next five to 10 years,'' Gross said.

Posted by Gary Price at 3:55 PM | Permalink

July 5, 2005

Cost Per Action Ads At Snap

Kevin Ryan offers a few thoughts on how cost-per-action ads work over at Snap.com. Cost per action? Yes, you decide what action you want to pay for -- a click or an actual acquisition -- and bid accordingly. More details from Snap here. The system rolled out at the end of February, as covered in this press release (PDF file).

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:17 AM | Permalink

May 10, 2005

Clusty, Snap, and Answers.com Profiled in Fortune

It's always good to see some of the newer names in web search getting the mainstream notice that they deserve. This is the case in three recently published articles in Fortune that profile Clusty, Answers.com and Snap:

I realize that Google is the search service with the greatest mindshare and using the name makes for a very noticeable headline. Nevertheless, I don't think constantly comparing every other search tool to Google is always the best idea. Let Clusty be Clusty. Let Answers.com do what they do best. The same with Snap. They all offer services that Google doesn't. Perhaps their biggest challenge for these companies is getting the word out about what they have to offer during a time when so much of the press only wants to talk about one or two companies. Clusty offers dynamic clustering (they also license their technology it to any company that wants it), Answers.com is a vertical that offers info for certain types of searches and actually works with Google. Snap offers both a unique interface and pay-for-performance ad program.

Thanks to S.C. for the news tip.

Posted by Gary Price at 3:37 PM | Permalink

May 3, 2005

Snap to the News

Searchblog turns us on to a new site for news search called Newsfilter.com. It could also be called Snap News Search (beta). Yes, Snap.com is now offering a news search tool that allows you to use their technology to search and dynamically modify your result sets from disparate news sources. Overall, an impressive start!

Snap News Search offers the user to dynamically modify their results with words in the title/headline, date and time (something we don't see elsewhere), and source.

Results pages contain two windows. One pane contains a list of results. Another window offers you the option to read the lead of the story and see a live image of the page as you browse the results list. Clicking the page image delivers the complete article. A third click opens the article in a new browser window.

Since Snap is into full disclosure it would be great if they could provide a list of all of the news sites they're crawling.

Postscript: G.L. points out a SiliconBeat post where Mike notes that NewsFilter is not using their own crawl of news sites but rather a feed from Moreover.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:14 AM | Permalink

April 19, 2005

A New Dynamic Search Term Suggestion Tool from Snap

Searchblog clues us into a new dynamic query suggestion tool from Snap.com. It might look and feel like Google Suggest but the difference is that instead of listing how many hits a search term or phrase might have, Snap.com lists how many times the terms have been searched. Snap's Bill Gross tells JB,

Google suggest is awesome, but doesnt do substrings, just the leading characters of the search term, I believe. Also, Google shows you hit count in the index, not number of searches performed by users. Number of searches by users seems to yield useful results from the network of people in a collaborative filtering kind of way.

Want to check out other dynamic query and search term suggestion tools? Resources from Surfwax and AOL's Pinpoint Shopping are linked to in this post.

Posted by Gary Price at 3:43 PM | Permalink

March 28, 2005

Displaying your Logo in Snap Search Results

Snap, the relatively new search engine from Idealab, wants to display your logo in search results. Today's SearchDay article, Enhancing Your Image with Snap.com, explains how.

Snap is a relatively low-traffic web site at this point, but it offers a number of unique features you won't find elsewhere, including cool refinement tools for searchers, and a number of payment options for advertisers. The company also offers unprecedented transparency, showing you exactly what searchers are looking for, where they're clicking and how much money the company makes when they do. It's an interesting approach that has real potential for catching on. Snap's parent is Idealab, the company that launched an unusual and controversial service back in the mid 1990s that evolved into search advertising powerhouse Overture.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 9:14 AM | Permalink

November 30, 2004

Snap Stats: Seeing What's Up With Snap.com

Via John Battelle, news of a nice nice write-up from SiliconBeat looking at the data Snap is freely providing about its operations, such as daily earnings, number of enrolled advertisers, ads generating clicks per day and other information.

Any worries that too much information is being given out? Nope, said founder Bill Gross, in the story Snap: the future of transparency?

You can see Snap's data directly via the its stats home page. Charts show number of advertisers, paid click, daily searches and more.

Drilling down via the financial stats page, I see that November has been the best month for the company, earning it $1,631.68. That's above the $1,176.40 in October, the only other month revenues have been earned.

Via the advertiser stats page, LookSmart is revealed to be the company's top advertiser in the last 30 days, spending $1,303 with Snap, dwarfing the next highest advertiser of Smarter.com at $90.

A traffic stats page shows that Top20.com just edges out Google as the site's top referring source. Both generated on the order of 50,000 referrals over the last seven days.

And yes, there is a keywords stats page, with "location" as the odd top query for the last seven days, followed by "book summary."

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:23 PM | Permalink

November 28, 2004

Snap.Com Profiled

The Pasadena Star-News offers has published a profile of Idealab's Snap.com.

[Snap.com] replaces the traditional "pay-per- click' search model, in which an advertiser pays the search engine for every click delivered to its Web site, with a 'pay-per- conversion' model in which advertisers only pay Snap based on purchases made at the site. 'We think that it is an innovation that everyone will be doing in five years,' said Chief Executive Officer Tom McGovern."

Posted by Gary Price at 7:43 AM | Permalink

November 3, 2004

Changes to Snap

On the Snap blog, Bill Gross lets us know about some changes to the appearance of his new search engine.

We changed the right two columns in the search results, we've added icons to the columns, we underlined the column names to call out sorting, we introduced click-back memory, we've added the ability to sort via a pull down menu, and fixed a bunch of special character search problems (like ampersands, etc.)

Posted by Gary Price at 1:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 5, 2004

Snap To It: New Search Engine Launches

Yesterday Stefanine Olsen reported from the Web 2.0 conference about a new project from Idealabs's, Bill Gross. Details in this blog post.

Today, Olsen talked with Gross about another new search project he's working on called Snap. A beta went live today. You can learn more in: New Snap site thinks outside the search box.

"It's going to be controversial, but it's awesome," Gross said in an interview at the Web 2.0 conference on Tuesday. "We're trying to improve search productivity.

It's also one of the first search engines to harness data on "user intentions," extrapolating meaning from words typed into a search box. It's done so by licensing data feeds from third-party Internet service providers, which have tracked, anonymously, what people do after they've typed in a specific search terms. It uses this special sauce, a data feed of more than a terabyte, to compute the relevancy of certain searches and resort results.

"...the most "subversive" part, Gross said, is that the service is transparent to advertisers and visitors. Snap will make money by selling advertising placements at the top of search results, but the twist is that it will let marketers pay specifically for people who buy at their site as a result of the Snap listing, a "cost per transaction" model. Furthermore, advertisers can specify, for example, that they want to pay 25 percent of their product cost or $4 for every widget they sell if a consumer buys it from the ad at Snap--and that information will be displayed in Snap's product listings. In comes the transparency.

Snap has licensed search technology from desktop search player x1. Data comes from Gigablast, Looksmart, along with "anonymous data feeds" from ISPs.

A Snap site tour is available here and Gross explains the new service on the Snap Weblog.

He writes, "We even are revealing OUR REVENUES. Our conviction is that you get better results because transparency prevents advertisers or others from gaming the system.:

The Snap help section has a bit more info about their ranking algorithm. Say hello to Snap Rank!

"...'Snap Rank' algorithm combines advanced calculations involving analyses of the web itself (such as link strength and query matches) with a large body of human data to deliver results that are accurate, trustworthy, and directly related to your intentions and needs. Snap processes post-search actions from our Snap Network, started in January of 2004. Snap evaluates where users go after a search - what listings they choose and how many pages they review on that site, right after the same search you did. The overall popularity of the site also influences the ranking.

Posted by Gary Price at 8:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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