Monthly Archives: June 2014

Analysis of Search Engine Crowdfunding Campaigns on IndieGoGo

This was originally posted on wbsrch.com. It is reproduced here to preserve history.

In the process of researching crowdfunding campaigns, I searched IndieGoGo for search engine pitches. I found 22 attempts to fund “actual search engines”.

Here is a list (with links to the IndieGoGo campaign):

TheNet101
Thumbar
Jixty.com
Xense
Iyiyes
Aspinosa
Rexyo
Asim Shah (unnamed project)
iSearchonline.tk
Slikk
ISearch2Help
MeSeek
Vexed Inc
Personalized Curated Mobile Search (no official name, so calling it PCMS)
Qrate
reSEARCH
Fedge No (unnamed project)
Crackerror
Aglepie
QuickVu
Chronologically
Nintag

Some of these have launched campaigns more than once, but I’m only counting them once. I’m also not counting niche and vertical search, only general search engines.

Aggregate Statistics

Project Asked Pledged Backers Date Comments FB Twitter G+ Pitch Quality
TheNet101 500 0 0 2014-03 1 0 0 0 C+
Thumbar 350000 1050 3 2013-12 2 2 183 0 B
Jixty.com 25000 25 1 2012-10 0 4 0 0 C-
Xense 2000000 0 0 Ongoing 2 0 0 0 D+
Iyiyes 250000 0 0 2012-09 0 0 0 0 C-
Aspinosa 35000 0 0 2012-03 0 0 0 0 C+
Rexyo 250000 0 0 2012-09 0 0 0 0 D*
Asim Shah 1500 40 8 2012-08 6 28 1 8 C-
iSearchonline 5000 0 0 2012-12 0 0 0 0 C+
Slikk 100000 40 2 2013-12 2 26 298 2 B
ISearch2Help 550 0 0 2013-05 0 0 0 0 D-
MeSeek 75000 77 5 2014-03 6 1000 517 0 A-*
Vexed Inc 500 0 0 2013-08 3 4 0 4 C-
PCMS 200000 0 0 2013-11 2 672 0 0 B-
Qrate 8500 105 5 2012-12 2 16 1 0 B+
reSEARCH 600000 0 0 2012-12 1 2 7 0 B
Fedge No 20000 0 0 2012-05 1 0 1 0 C-
Crackerror 5000 1 1 2014-07 4 13 1 1 D+
Aglepie 5000 0 0 2011-01 0 0 0 0 C-
QuickVu 867943 100 1 2013-11 4 2 0 0 D
Chronologically 3000 0 0 2013-09 2 0 0 0 D+
Nintag 100000 0 0 2013-03 0 0 0 0 C
* Video missing (deleted from YouTube)
** Some of these are denominated in GBP. I didn’t really pay attention to which, but it doesn’t change the numbers meaningfully, since they’re all nearly zero.

Statistics Summary

No campaigns were fully funded.

None with zero Facebook shares had any pledges.

Only four were shared on Google+ and of those, only 3 had pledges. As always, G+ is not relevant unless you’re a Google employee.

Only four had more than one person listed as being on the team.

14 of the 22 had no backers at all.

9 of the 22 asked for a six-figure or higher sum.

14 projects were not shared on Twitter. Of those, only 2 had pledges.

The biggest pledge was $1050. Of that $1025 was by someone related to (same last name as) the pitcher.

$64 average per campaign, or $19 not counting the bid by a relative.

I tried to find out what became of these pitches and whether they continued after the
failed campaign. Some point to domain parking pages, some to sites
not related to search at all, and at least one points to a malware
site. The best part about the malware site was that a popup said that my “Ubuntu needs
updating” and the update showed up as being for “Ubuntu by Microsoft, Inc.”
Hilarious. Can’t find it again or I’d share a screenshot.

Postmortem

Here are the ones I was able to find anything about:

Nintag (gone as of 2015-09) is a Nigerian search engine. If you search for the words Yoruba, Igbo, or Lagos you
find real results, most of which are based in Nigeria. If you search
for the word “cheese” you get zero results. I guess they don’t
have cheese in Nigeria, and that makes me a bit sad for them. Even though the results are somewhat questionable to a non-Nigerian,
they appear to be at least partially accomplishing their mission.
That’s good because Nigeria should have its own search engine. They
certainly have enough people to serve. I wish them well.

Jixty (gone as of 2015-09) exists. It’s not obvious at first glance, but based on the search results for
“pants” being essentially identical to Google, it looks like they’re a front end to Google (a google Custom Search Engine).

Iyiyes exists. It, too, appears to be a front-end to a Google custom search. I don’t
know why sites bother if a big bag of nothing is all they’re going to bring to the table. Google’s already doing Google.

MeSeek.com is also interesting. They had the strongest social effort and
scored the highest in my opinion of the different pitches, though
nobody had an “A” rating (but they could have had an amazing video presentation). MeSeek appears to let you rate search
results, but the results look like they came from Google (I can’t be sure). They have
news, horoscopes, and weather, a publisher program, stock quotes, an
advertising platform that only appears to show ads for MeSeek, and
even an article directory, too. You can even change your background on their site. It’s
also in the Alexa top million (around 200,000 as I write this). The campaign was started by a fella inamed Charles Forell, and I’d like to have a chat with him to see what he’s up to.

TheNet101 is also an interesting result. They’re a meta-search engine that includes results from Google, Bing, Blippex, Wikipedia, Blekko, Yelp, Archive.org, and Faroo.

Wait, what’s Blippex?

Blippex.org is a search engine that ranks results based on user engagement determined by using a browser plugin that measures “dwell time”. It’s a very Alexa-like system, one I understand well since I built one to gather data for Alytik, but it adds a bit more.

However, it appears that Blippex is the walking dead. Despite search being online and showing a URL count of 29.3 million, there haven’t been any blog posts since October 2013 and no Github activity since October 2013. This seems like an interesting idea that has been shelved, but not shut down yet. Neat, though, that you can change the search results by adjusting how much the dwell time and age metrics affect ranking.

Thank you, TheNet101.com, for introducing me a new and interesting search project, even if it may not still be active. Sorry your crowdfunding campaign didn’t work out.

Conclusions

In most of these pitches, the pitcher didn’t claim any particular domain knowledge required to build a search again, let alone claim software development skill. Combined with a scarcity of working demos, it’s unsurprising that none of these were funded.

Social sharing helps, and no sharing at all is pretty much a guarantee of failure.

Saying you are going to beat Google does not help. I wonder why.

IndieGoGo also doesn’t seem to be the best choice for funding a search engine.

Update September 2015: noted dead links

AdSense Alternatives for Startups and Small Websites

This was originally posted on wbsrch.com. It is reproduced here to preserve history.

In starting WbSrch, a search competitor to Google, I knew that at some point Google would find a way to “invite us to leave” AdSense. The Terms of Service make it clear that it is incompatible with a search engine (can’t have ads on pages that link to adult content, gambling, etc.)

That day came a little over a month ago when I received a message that ads were no longer running on the site because Google discovered a violation of their TOS in one of the result pages for a particular adult-oriented search term.

Sure, I could remove the offending link from the search results page (which I did because it also didn’t fit with the WbSrch inclusion policy), but that sort of thing would be sure to happen again. Around one sixth of the URLs on the web are porn, so it’s virtually impossible to exclude it all. Be very skeptical of anyone who claims they’re able to block all porn.

The Advertising Options

From my research, these are the notable companies that do online advertising:

Bidvertiser
Qadabra
Affinity
Infolinks
Advertising.com
Adversal
PulsePoint
Conversant (formerly ValueClick)
Clicksor
AdBlade
AdSide
Vibrant Media
Yahoo/Bing Ads (formerly Media.net)
Link Worth
Tribal Fusion
Kontera

Contacting the Advertisers

I looked into all of them, eliminating those that
require massive traffic volume to get started or have a reputation for
spreading malware.

These are the ones I tried to contact (at the end of April) asking whether their service would be compatible with WbSrch:

Qadabra
Chitika
Yahoo/Bing (formerly Media.net)
Conversant Media
Kontera
Bidvertiser
Affinity.com
Infolinks

I asked the same question of every site:

Hello,

I run a small but growing search engine at http://wbsrch.com.

I would like to know whether your service would be appropriate for use as the advertising provider for this search engine.

WbSrch.com indexes and links to most of the internet. We try to
exclude adult and other “icky” sites from the index, but that’s not
possible to do with an automated crawler. This means that at any given
time there will be links to things we don’t want to index per our policy
(http://wbsrch.com/policy/),
but that will eventually be removed. None of this content is hosted on
our site, but it is linked to depending on the search phrase used.

The search engine has indexes in 25 different languages, though most traffic is for the English-language index.

Given the nature of search engines, would WbSrch.com be compatible with your advertising platform?

What follows are the responses to this message and the action I took based on the responses.

Outright Failures

Bidvertiser had a broken captcha on their contact form, so I couldn’t contact them. Their policy says that they don’t allow linking to some content types, so
they probably would have said no.

Bing did not have a contact form. They might now. I think
they are still in alpha/beta/whatever. Even so, they’re still a
competitor, so not something wise to use long-term.

Non-Responses

Chitika never responded to my inquiry.

Conversant Media never responded to my inquiry.

Affinity.com never responded to my inquiry.

Responses

Qadabra responded the fastest, saying that they were totally
compatible with search engines and that they already had some search engine
customers. The message had a friendly tone.

Kontera was the second response. They said they they are not
compatible with search engines, but they were polite about it.

Infolinks replied three days later (on a Sunday) with a
fairly rude message that said “our quality assurance team found that your site
does not meet our publisher criteria” and “We at Infolinks
have the responsibility to keep our advertising environment up to certain
standards to ensure the success of Infolinks for our
publishers, advertisers and those viewing our ads.” OK, that’s fine if you don’t
want to work with a new site, but don’t be rude about it. At least now I know they’re too special and important to ever do business with.

The Winner

Based on these responses I went with Qadabra. They also said
that they work with traffic in all languages. Great!

Setup was easy, and ads started working immediately. I had a
few glitches with some ads behaving strangely, but it was a minor thing. Every
time I contacted them they were very helpful and friendly.

You don’t really get control over the types of ads that are
shown. Most of what I saw were ads for video games and the occasional ad for Russian
brides.

I did not enable any of their rich media ads, just banners,
so I have no experience with those. I know they earn more, but I’m generally opposed to popups, popovers, flyouts, videos, and things that make noise. If I visit a site that uses them I’m less likely to return.

Qadabra revenue was significantly less than AdSense, earning about
one sixth as much per thousand impressions. Their system documentation says
that they optimize it over time, so if I gave them a longer trial period, income
would probably go up.

Now that WbSrch has switched to SSL-only (inspired by Reset the Net), I can’t use
Qadabra. They don’t have SSL support, so even if their ads
were enabled, they wouldn’t load. If they add that I’ll consider using them
again, if not for WbSrch then for other sites.

I like the people at Qadabra, and I’m happy with their tech
support, but this experiment has ended after only one month, and there don’t
appear to be any other reasonable alternatives.

Qadabra is relatively new, created in 2011, so
they are still polishing their game. If you want a reasonable AdSense
alternative for lower-traffic sites and don’t require SSL, I recommend them.

The long-term plan always was to build an ad platform
internally to use with WbSrch. Not finding a platform that is a perfect fit for
us is just another motivating factor.

For now, I’m just going to focus on improving the search engine so we’re in a better position to monetize it later on. Since traffic has been increasing by around 100% per month for the last few months, it shouldn’t be too long.