In our effort to stay cutting edge and try out new things, we’ve launched our own video channel at nuroa.es and nuroa.de called “NuroaTV“. I think that this makes us the property search engine to delve seriously into videos.

And no, we’re not trying to be YouTube II, but we do think that video is just another format for presenting our users with relevant information and feedback from other consumers. I think that the results — that is, the video below — speaks for itself!

In any case, last weekend a bunch of us (along with our young video director, Xesc Estapé and his production team) hung out in the centre of Barcelona to see what average people thought about various issues, one of which was the effect of the real estate “crisis” on the Spanish elections, which will take place this Sunday. We thought that it was timely given that even the New York Times had written a story about real estate and the Spanish elections.

Our series is called: “¿y tú qué piensas? (so what do you think?)“, and it fits into our strategy of offering hyperlocal content that keeps real estate consumers well informed about current market conditions. For the moment, the video is on a separate page on Nuroa’s website, but we will soon integrate our videos directly into the search results page.

For this first video, we went to the streets of Barcelona to see what the Spanish public really thought about José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the Socialist prime minister, and his conservative rival, Mariano Rajoy in the context of the housing crisis. Let’s just say that people were generally pissed about the current situation.

But don’t take my word for it. Take a look for yourself! And please let me know what you think about the video. (Warning: The video is in Spanish, but there are still quite a few very funny images that can be understood no matter what language you speak!)

I was surprised to read Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch post on Friday that Edgeio was going to be shut down. On the one hand, it’s kind of scary, my being in the vertical search space and all.

There’s always that moment of initial fear when you read something like that. Maybe nuroa really isn’t going to work? WTF have I gotten myself into? And HTF did they burn through $5 million in less than a year without being able to generate any revenue or relevant traffic or enter into any significant strategic alliances? This is perhaps the biggest question in most people’s minds. (It still amazes me that a start-up that launched in Feb. 2006 could receive a cheque for $ 5 million from a VC only 7 months later! I’m assuming the valuation at that point must have been somewhere between $15 and $20 million?)

But upon closer analysis, it’s clear that Edgeio’s problems had less to do with being a vertical search engine and more to do with being more of a concept than a business. To me, Edgeio’s failure reflects the danger of creating a tech-geek project with very little appeal or applicability in the real world.

Following are the four main lessons that I think can be learned from Edgeio’s demise.

Not All Vertical Search Engines Are Created Equal: Whereas the majority of vertical search engines crawl classifieds portals like Idealista and ImmobilienScout 24, or have a direct relationship with real estate agencies like Sasi or Engel & Völkers, Edgeio’s model was to operate — as the name suggests — on the “edge”. Cutting through the PR jargon, this means that they only looked for classifieds listings on blogs or other RSS-enabled sources — this explains Michael Arrington’s involvement and value-added to the project. TechCrunch was the ideal platform from which to launch a blog-focused vertical search engine. As TechCrunch explained when Edgeio launched: “The Edgeio ethos is that content belongs on the edges, and that is where the name originates from (Edge input/output). Content on the edges means the content on the millions of blogs and other sites out there which Edgeio does a good job of aggregating and organizing.” So whereas property search engines like nuroa aim to disrupt the traditional classifieds space by crawling mainstream classifieds sites, Edgeio chose instead to bet that sellers would be willing to create blogs on which they listed their properties or other classifieds, and Edgeio would then aggregate those blogged classified listings. The basic problem is that a business focused only on classifieds in blogs is not currently very scalable, as the majority of people still use more traditional offline and online options (e.g., classifieds portals and newspapers) to advertise classifieds goods.

Classifieds Are Local: Given that their main market is the blogosphere, Edgeio was never focused on any one geographical market. If you take a look at their website (which is very well-designed by the way), the tagline is “search the world’s listings”. Their value proposition was that they granted you access to over 100 million listings in 1,484,953 cities and 166 countries What does this mean in practice? If I’m looking for an apartment in Barcelona, why would I care that there are lots of listings in 1,484,952 other cities? Also, I don’t really see why local advertisers would choose to advertise on an “international” website, particularly if this international website isn’t one of the leaders in its local classifieds space. In other words, if I am Expofinques and I want to strengthen my market position in Madrid where I’m not as strong as I am in Barcelona, why would I advertise on Edgeio as opposed to the other sites that are more focused on Madrid? And if I’m a property buyer in Barcelona why would I be more interested in searching “the world’s listings” than in searching “the most complete set of listings in Barcelona”? Start-ups have to focus on a market, or a product, or on something in particular. Being focused on “the world’s listings” is largely meaningless, other than as a concept.

Keep Your Burn Rate Down Until You Have Some Indice of Possible Success: Edgeio’s hype always had more to do with the connection to Michael Arrington and TechCrunch than anything else. Whereas companies like Trulia, Simply Hired and Indeed have generated significant traffic, marquee-name investors (Sequioa, News Corp. and The New York Times) and are growing nicely (e.g., Trulia’s U.S. traffic is up 130 percent in 2007, to 1.2 million unique visitors per month, according to Comscore), Oodle’s vanguardist and diffuse approach never seemed to catch on. Nonetheless, it seems that they were determined to buy their success and hoped to convince investors to continue investing in them, even though they had no material revenues, traffic or partnerships. Michael Arrington is pretty direct in explaining why Edgeio had to close down: “The company burned through [$5 million] according to plan, meaning they ran out this month. The product roadmap was fulfilled, meaning development lags didn’t hurt the company. But the revenues didn’t come in and user/partner milestones weren’t met. And that meant no one else was going to put more money into the company.” In the comments section, he’s even more reflective and frank: “In general I’ll say this - it is unwise for a company to spend a lot of money building out infrastructure before a product proves itself.”

This is just further proof of what Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures noted in a recent post entitled “Why Early Stage Venture Investments Fail“: “[I]t’s pretty clear to me that most venture backed investments don’t fail because the business plan was flawed. In my experience at least 2/3 of all business plans we back are flawed. Most venture backed investments fail because the venture capital is used to scale the business before the correct business plan is discovered. That scale/burn rate becomes the cancer that kills the business.”

It’s Easier to Criticize than to Do It Yourself: I can’t help but note a certain irony in noting that one of tech’s most noted and sometimes more hyper-critical bloggers — he created the Dead Pool with a certain glee — is the co-founder of the most prominent vertical search engine to enter the Dead Pool, despite all of the natural advantages that he has given his access to financing and marketing. Most of us would give our left arm to appear prominently in TechCrunch, but Edgeio is proof that expensive marketing can’t make up for an ill-conceived product.

And it also shows that like the old saying goes: “Opinions are like assholes. Everyone has one.” It’s a lot easier to criticize others than to create a successful product yourself.

The best we can do is hope to learn from Edgeio’s mistakes so as not to end up like they did.

Sorry, that’s a random reference to one of my favorite “dumb” movies — White Chicks from the Wayans Brothers. It’s basically the ghetto equivalent of saying “Bring it on!”or “Let the Games Begin!”

Long story short, News International has invested in a UK property vertical search engine called Globrix. A few key facts:

• The investment was for “a multi-million pound funding round”. Combined with the valuation that Properazzi got from Mangrove just for the initial idea of a vertical search engine a couple of years ago, it shows that the property search engines like nuroa are an increasingly interesting area.
• The company, Globrix, still hasn’t launched, but intends to launch during this month. The company was founded in 2007. If you go to their website, you will see that they are still in private beta. This makes me a little better about all those people who asked “When are you going to launch nuroa?” Sometimes the prize doesn’t go to the person who launched first.
• The million-pound investment appears focused on marketing and advertising, as the goal is to make Globrix one of the most trafficked property sites in the UK within the next 12 months. So they’re going to buy their way into being a market leader.
• Globrix’s business model appears to be exactly the same as nuroa’s.
• News Corp claims that the technology is “next generation”, which is simply another way of saying “a web 2.0 property search engine”, just like nuroa. As the CEO of Globrix explains: “Globrix is about answering a fundamental need in this marketplace - creating a Google-style model for the property search industry. By enabling agents to list for free we cover virtually every property in the UK, which in turn provides a hugely compelling proposition for consumers and creates a new opportunity for an ad-funded model.“
• News Corp argues that investments in vertical search are a key part of its digital strategy (it should be remembered that News Corp invested $13.5 million in the US jobs vertical search engine, Simply Hired ( www.simplyhired.com), which Google is reportedly in talks to buy, a fact confirmed to us by a News International representative at a conference that we attended recently. In any case, News Corp appears committed to vertical search. As Clive Milner, Group Managing Director, News International, said: “Through its digital and print media, News International is one of the largest single players in the UK property media market, so this investment is about us remaining at the forefront of what’s happening commercially and technologically. Globrix is set to be a truly disruptive business in the online property search marketplace - it essentially turns the economics upside down and creates an unparalleled consumer offering from an innovative business model.”
• News International invested in a property search engine, despite already owning 50% of the number 2 property portal in the UK (Property Finder — www.propertyfinder.com). As mentioned above, they note that the new technology is the next step forward, even taking in account their years of experience in the classifieds sector, both print and in web 1.0 vertical real estate portals like Idealista and ImmobilienScout.
• All of this despite the fact that the UK property market is one of the most difficult, given the economic power of Rightmove (a valuation of €1.2 billion) and its exclusive control of the real estate agents (the top 3 real estate networks that control about 60% of the market are their original JV backers). No other market in Europe has barriers to entry as high as the UK market or as many strong already existing competitors. By comparison, the France, Spain and Germany are relatively easy — the market leaders aren’t quite as dominant and there are fewer property search engines covering those markets.

I think this is good news for other vertical search players, particularly those of us not focused exclusively on the highly competitive UK market. It seems that Globrix will do essentially the same thing, but will now count on a few million pounds to attack other UK players such as Extate, OnOneMap, Nestoria, Zoompf, Right Move, etc.

More news to come tomorrow about the recent ICMA conference, and the present Web 2.0 conference that I’m attending.

We did it!

After what can only be described as an eventful and interesting year and a half, our website has finally gone live.

In the end, we have decided to launch vertical by vertical, country by country. The goal is to offer a depth and degree of local knowledge that tends to be absent in some of our competitors. We understand that classifieds are extremely local. Not even national in many cases. Extremely local.

A user in Berlin could often care less about the housing market in Munich (unless the move is inter-regional).

Similarly, most home buyers in Barcelona could care less about the various neighborhoods in Madrid. That information does little to inform her search for a property in a few select neighborhoods in Barcelona, and even within Barcelona, if she’s only searching for properties in Gracia and the Eixample Esquerre, she could probably care less about the real estate market in Sants and Sarria (two other districts within Barcelona).

Our goal is to understand what motivates and concerns the user in each key region. Otherwise, it will be very difficult to provide a truly satisfying user experience. There’s a limit to how individualised you can make the search experience, but the goal is to make it feel extremely personalised, and the first step in the context of a real estate search engine is to make it feel extremely local.

So that’s why we have started with two real estate sites: one in Germany (www.nuroa.de) and one in Spain (www.nuroa.es). They’re password protected for a couple of weeks — we’re still correcting a few major bugs like the fact that the search engine confuses Barcelona city with Barcelona province — but we will give the password to anyone who wants it, and we wholeheartedly welcome your feedback. (Please send me an email to gary @ migoa.com, and I’ll get you the passwords.)

Our goal is to launch in the UK and France within the near future, but only to the extent that we can launch something that demonstrates an understanding of how the local markets work. And only to the extent that we can dedicate sufficient resources so that the websites don’t just become cut-and-paste versions in French and in English.

We are the only vertical search engine in the world to include what we are calling “intuitive search”, which essentially means that we integrate web 2.0 aspects (i.e., we integrate relevant real estate blogs, newspaper articles, videos, photos, etc.) into our search results without detracting too much from the central focus of the page — the real estate listings. So if you do a search for “piso Barcelona”, you will get the search results AND in another column you might see relevant articles from the APIs in Barcelona telling you why now is the time to buy, or a study from BBVA about the evolution of prices in Barcelona, plus pics that other users have taken in and of Barcelona, etc.

We think that intuitive search is the wave of the future. The “big” search engines are already experimenting in this area with Ask3D and Google’s universal search. We think that they understand the future of search pretty well, so we adapted some of their insights to our particular verticals.

And such an approach makes sense. We understand that finding the right apartment is often only the first of many steps in the property purchasing process. And it is only one of the many considerations that will determine if, when and how you will purchase your dream home. So our results page tries to figure out what these other relevant considerations might be and provides you the collective insight of other members of our real estate community.

Our refined search features are also pretty cool and are supplemented by the ability to search by tags. And it all works pretty dynamically. So you have many options to narrow down the millions of possible search results into the few really relevant results that meet your criteria. That’s the key comparative advantage of a “vertical” search engine relative to a “horizontal” one like Google — the results should be more precise and relevant with regard to the vertical in question.

Our “official” launches will take place during the month of October at various conferences. We will launch the German site at DemoGermany (the German/European equivalent of the successful US conference). And if all goes according to plan, we will launch the international site at the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) conference in London next week. We’re currently ironing out the details right now with Ryan, but it looks like they’ll give us a few minutes in front of the general audience to make a brief pitch. Both are cool events that will be attended by influential bloggers and press, so it makes sense for us to use them to launch.

And on top of that, both conferences should be cool.

I sincerely believe that the final product reflects the hard work and analyses that went into it. A lot of influential investors and people from the sector have already congratulated us on the interface. And our tech is probably among the best of the current vertical search players. That’s our goal, in any case.

One commentator on Juan Luis’s blog said that we took too long in development, which surprised me given that we took the same amount of time as the original vertical search engines in the US. Our goal wasn’t to put out a rushed and underdeveloped product, or a cut-and-paste version of what already exists in the US. Our goal was to put out something innovative with truly disruptive potential. I think that we have done it.

And as I have noted elsewhere on this blog, Google was the 12th search engine to launch.

The goal isn’t always to be first.

The goal is to be the best.

Particularly in the tech sector, the two concepts are often not synonomous.

Try out nuroa and let me know what you think.

Simon Waldman, Director of Digital Strategy for the Guardian Media Group in the UK, has posted a very insightful presentation about the intersection of the Internet and Web 2.0 on his blog. The text reflects a speech he gave to a German general media audience in Berlin. There is also a pdf version of the script of the presentation.

Simon makes the following arguments:

• Newspapers that want to survive need to embrace, exploit and excel in web 2.0. “There is no denying that our industry — particularly in Western Europe and North America — is structurally challenged, and that is almost entirely down to the net. . . . But I fundamentally believe that newspaper publishers who are prepared to experiment, innovate and invest online will create significant cultural and commercial value as a result of their efforts.”
• Internet moves quickly and probably a lot more quickly than the pace to which traditional media groups are accustomed. “Being online is like having a shop in a mall– you have to keep up with everyone around you, even if they’re not a direct competitor. Otherwise, you seem very tired, very quickly.”
• There are four axes of Web 2.0. “I know that there are all sorts of definitions of Web 2.0, but in my mind there are four key characteristics in the boom: Social networks, search and aggregation, collaboration and video.”
• Google is a frenemy. “Google and its impact on every sector of the economy’s attempt to grapple with the Internet are undeniable — and the newspaper industry perhaps more than most. Some of us see them as a competitor and a stealer of content; others see it as a source of traffic and revenue . . . . [B]ut all I will say is that defining and understanding a relationship with Google and other search players and aggregators is a crucial part of operating effectively in the online world.”
• There’s no turning back, even though most newspaper companies and traditional media groups might wish otherwise. “I wish Google would go back to being a nice, cuddly search engine that does no evil, rather than a global advertising bohemoth. Or at the very least, I wish they had to pay big bucks to carry our headlines and first paragraphs on Google News. I wish free classifieds sites would go away, or that the Internet has recruitment advertisers rushing to spend more rather than less. . . . [B]ut I also know that they are not going to happen. . . . The point is - this is about change. Not a gentle, start of the new school year, kind of change — but disruptive, shifting of tectonic plates kind of change.”

It’s good to see this kind of realistic optimism from the traditional media. There are obviously a lot of synergies between newspapers / media groups on the one hand, and search engines on the other. Indeed has The New York Times as an investor and strategic ally. Simply Hired has News Corp. Yahoo and Google are also increasingly trying to create cross-selling opportunities with newspaper groups.

But it’s also true that when we spoke to some investors initially - and even more recently - people seem to have the concern that search engines and aggregators “steal” their content, rather than they are partners that can redirect traffic to their businesses for less money than traditional media outlets, like newspapers, that charge a lot more for reaching target audiences.

In any case, it seems that the “slow death of newspapers” at the hands of search engines, aggregators and online classifieds sites is in the news a bit this week. Don Dodge has also an interesting post entitled “Online classified ads take $3.1 billion from newspapers,” which is review of an article in the Washington Post about the same topic. The post article is particularly interesting because it examines how vertical search engines such as Edgeio and Oodle are disrupting traditional classifieds businesses.

The bottom line: Search engines and aggregators are here to stay. Not all of us will survive, and most of us will be co-opted or bought. A few may become large, independent IPO-friendly companies. But the technological and economic disruption to traditional media companies can not be ignored or denied.

Since I haven’t posted in a bit (I was away in Nice for a few days of vacation), I’m feeling a bit apologetic and maybe also a bit nostalgic. So I’ve decided to “honour” the Wall Street Journal article that initially inspired us to start migoa. It was back in late 2005 when Oriol and I were looking to start a business together and were scanning the US newspapers for interesting ideas. We came across this article, and the rest is history. It seems a bit outdated now — we’ve learned so much since reading this article about search, vertical search, advertising models, Internet businesses, etc. — but the article’s key insights remain the same: One size doesn’t fit all.

I hope the Wall Street Journal won’t mind this brief “honour”. It’s done with nothing but love (and Rupert Murdoch is apparently going the online Journal more accessible, so I’ll help give them a jumpstart).

———

	December 19, 2005

THE JOURNAL REPORT: TECHNOLOGY

DOW JONES REPRINTS This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers, use the Order Reprints tool at the bottom of any article or visit: www.djreprints.com. • See a sample reprint in PDF format. • Order a reprint of this article now. Consumer Technology Beyond Google Yes, there are other search engines. And some may even work better for you. By KEVIN J. DELANEY Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL December 19, 2005; Page R1 One size doesn’t necessarily fit all. It’s true whether you’re talking about clothes or screwdrivers. And it’s also true in search engines. While Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are great at serving up answers to many types of queries, they aren’t always the best way to find specialized information. You’ll often get thousands of results for your query — but many of them end up off-topic, and there’s no easy way to narrow them down to get to what you want. THE JOURNAL REPORT   See the complete Technology report1. That’s where a growing crop of specialized search sites comes in. They’re sometimes known as “vertical” search engines because they target a single vertical, or industry, category — such as booking travel, buying a house or finding a job. Instead of trawling through billions of Web pages to find results, the way the big engines do, vertical engines limit their searches to industry-specific sites. And they usually serve up lists of actual things — such as houses for sale or open jobs — instead of links to pages where you might find them. So you spend less time skimming through irrelevant links to find what you want. On top of that, the sites let you filter the results by factors such as salary, price or location. “Often, a specialized database can take you directly” to the most useful information and save you time, says Gary Price, news editor of the Search Engine Watch site. “Every useful result can’t be in the first few results from a major Web engine, and that’s where most people look.” GOOGLE KEEPS ON GROWING   PODCAST:2 Where will Google stop? The search giant has branched out into a variety of other Web services, from email to news to displaying satellite images online. WSJ’s Kevin J. Delaney discusses Google’s evolution, where it may be going from here, and how much of a threat its expansion poses to other companies. These sites often don’t look much like regular search engines. Since they often focus on finding goods and services instead of information, it can be hard to tell them apart from comparison-shopping sites or out-and-out retail sites. But the vertical sites all draw their data from a range of sources and generally don’t engage in any sorts of transactions themselves — they simply pass users along to the source of the information. The sites usually make their money from advertising, but in some cases they earn a commission on transactions, such as when users purchase books found through their site. To be sure, much of the material that vertical engines turn up also shows up in large search engines. The big guys also offer advanced search commands that let users home in on some types of information. But the big names’ general-purpose search engines rarely offer the vertical engines’ precision or ability to sort and filter the results. Perhaps the best measure of the vertical engines’ effectiveness: Big search-engine companies have splashed out into vertical areas themselves, such as Google’s video and book search sites, and the local search sites from Google, Microsoft and Yahoo that let you find businesses in a specific area. Here’s a look at some common search tasks — and a sampling of specialized search engines that will get you what you’re looking for. YOU’RE LOOKING FOR a book SEARCH TOOLS isbn.nu3, BookFinder4, RedLightGreen5, NetLibrary6 Searching for books online doesn’t begin and end with Amazon. Isbn.nu, a site owned by Seattle free-lance journalist and consultant Glenn Fleishman, allows users to find and compare prices on books across about a dozen different online retailers. BookFinder.com7, run by a unit of Canada’s Abebooks Inc., provides a similar service. RedLightGreen.com8, provided by RLG, a nonprofit collective of libraries and other institutions, takes the searching in a slightly different direction. Not only can you trawl through a database of bibliographic information looking for a title, you also can type in the name of your local public or university library and see if the book is in the stacks. Then there’s the NetLibrary.com9 service provided by the nonprofit OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc. The service allows you to search the full text of more than 100,000 digitized books and audio books and then access that content from your computer. The service is free, but you usually need to supply a library-card number. A NetLibrary text search for “slavery,” for instance, returned 721 results, ranging from “The Boys’ Life of Abraham Lincoln” to “New Forces in Old China: An Inevitable Awakening.” Users can see where the keyword appears in the texts and then read the entire books online. Users can also find, download and listen to audio books free — including recent works such as “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” by Jonathan Safran Foer — on their Windows PCs or some compatible portable music players. Technology built into the audio files causes them to become unusable three weeks after being downloaded. Some big-name search engines are getting into this area. Google has made headlines with its program for scanning books in a handful of libraries and letting consumers search their texts; some writers and publishers are upset with Google’s digitizing books that are still protected by copyright. Meanwhile, a separate coalition of libraries and companies has created the Open Content Alliance, which aims to support the scanning of books and make them available for users to search and read online. The effort is starting with books whose copyrights have expired, and plans to get permission before scanning copyrighted books. The OCLC, for its part, has explicit agreements with publishers. YOU’RE LOOKING FOR job listings SEARCH TOOLS Simply Hired10, Indeed11, Yahoo HotJobs12 Job-hunting sites abound on the Internet. But some specialized search engines can turn up more postings — and make it easier to home in on the ones that interest you. On a recent day, Simply Hired Inc.’s site, for example, boasted an index of about 4.5 million help-wanted listings. Simply Hired, of Mountain View, Calif., draws from thousands of sources, including online classifieds and company Web sites, and job seekers can filter the results using a host of sophisticated criteria — ranging from location to whether an employer made the Working Mother magazine list of the 100 best companies to work for. A recent search on Simply Hired for accounting jobs in a 25-mile vicinity of Portland, Maine, turned up 74 help-wanted listings. A similar search at Monster Worldwide Inc.’s site turned up only six postings. Using filters, Simply Hired’s list can be narrowed to, for instance, 29 jobs at companies with revenue over $500 million. Indeed, of Stamford, Conn., takes a similar approach to searching a vast number of job-listing resources on its Web site, though it has a narrower range of filtering options. Users can get updated results for their searches sent to them via Really Simple Syndication, or RSS — a service that forwards the information to special Web sites or software for easy review. Yahoo’s HotJobs offers a similar service, having in July expanded to search through employer Web sites and other online job services. YOU’RE LOOKING FOR information from your industry SEARCH TOOLS GlobalSpec13, Scirus14, IT.com15, LawCrawler16 People in some fields — mostly technical ones — can use specialized search engines to easily find information related to their line of work. GlobalSpec Inc., for one, offers an engineering search engine that searches about 200 million engineering and technical Web pages. GlobalSpec, of Troy, N.Y., also allows users to search within specialized databases, such as published technical standards and patent filings in the U.S. and internationally. Elsevier BV’s Scirus.com17 search engine includes over 200 million science-specific Web pages. A search for “synapse” on Scirus turned up an estimated 38,000 results from scientific journals alone. Washington-based IT.com Inc.’s search engine is geared toward people researching topics and products related to corporate information technology, such as computer servers. But industry-specific engines aren’t limited to scientific fields. The FindLaw unit of Thomson Corp., Stamford, Conn., offers LawCrawler.com18: a Google search engine that limits its searches to legal-related Web sites or databases. YOU’RE LOOKING FOR a home to buy or rent SEARCH TOOLS Trulia19, HomePages20, Oodle21 Various commercial databases of homes for sale exist online, including the more than 2.5 million listings available through the National Association of Realtors at Realtor.com22. A few specialized search engines try to offer an alternative by searching through a range of other real-estate listings, such as classified ads. The search engine from San Francisco-based Trulia Inc., for example, mines more than 100,000 real-estate Web sites. Trulia, which was still in testing mode and limited to California listings at the time of this writing, recently turned up 175 homes for sale in Oakland with asking prices over $700,000, plotting them on a Google map of the area. HomePages.com23 from HouseValues Inc., Kirkland, Wash., similarly aggregates online real-estate listings and plots results on a map. The service covers the whole country, but it appears to be limited when searching in smaller cities. Oodle Inc., San Mateo, Calif., searches classified ads — for real-estate as well as other listings — and allows users to filter results by location, price, number of bedrooms and other criteria. Users can also have new listings emailed to them as they are posted. YOU’RE LOOKING FOR airline flights, hotels SEARCH TOOLS SideStep24, Kayak25, FareChase26, Mobissimo27 Many travel sites offer flights on a variety of airlines, cars from a range of rental companies, and hotels from a number of chains. But travel search engines can provide the most options by drawing on multiple sources. They search through the listings on traditional travel sites, as well as those on hotel, airline and rental-car sites — some of which don’t show up elsewhere. One granddaddy of the group is SideStep Inc., of Santa Clara, Calif. When the service started up, users had to download a toolbar for their Web browser to do comparison shopping. But consumers can now conduct searches using the company’s Web site, SideStep.com28. SideStep searches more than 100 travel-related sites, including ones whose listings don’t show up on some of the main travel-broker sites, such as discount airline JetBlue Airways and the Holiday Inn hotel chain. Kayak.com29 from Kayak Software Corp. of Norwalk, Conn., and Yahoo’s FareChase.com30 service offer similar features. Kayak’s bells and whistles include a graphical list of best fares from a given airport, using the Google Maps service. San Francisco-based Mobissimo Inc.’s Mobissimo.com31 Web site distinguishes itself by including flights from travel sites and discount airlines based in Europe and Asia. YOU’RE LOOKING FOR a person’s phone number and postal or email address SEARCH TOOL Argali White & Yellow32 The big search engines can provide addresses and phone numbers for businesses and individuals. But few, if any, can match the depth and power of Argali White & Yellow (Argali.com33), a search engine devoted to the task. To use Argali, from Darwin Holdings Inc., of Princeton, N.J., you must install a piece of software on your PC. (The program is free, but if you want a faster, ad-free version, a subscription costs up to $29.95 a year. No Mac version is available.) The service scours more than 20 online information sources and provides a number of useful ways to search and sort the data. Argali’s features include reverse lookup of phone numbers and addresses, links to maps of any given address, and information about other people and businesses on the same street. The service also offers to look up people’s email addresses, though it had little success in a quick test: A search for email addresses for a handful of individuals didn’t turn up any accurate ones. YOU’RE LOOKING FOR entries from reference sources SEARCH TOOL Answers.com34 If you go to a big search engine looking for background on a certain topic, you’ll usually get a series of links to other pages — which means more surfing to get what you want. Answers.com, formerly known as GuruNet, cuts out the middleman by collecting all the information and organizing it into a Web page. Type “Internet” into the site, for example, and it displays a comprehensive history and explanation of the Internet, with entries culled from the Computer Desktop Encyclopedia, Columbia University Press Encyclopedia, Wikipedia and other sources. The top results from Google on a recent day, by contrast, included the sites of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer software and an online movie database. “We see ourselves as complementary to search engines,” says Bob Rosenschein, chairman and chief executive of Answers Corp. in Jerusalem, which offers the service. Indeed, Google’s results page for some queries includes a “definition” link that takes users to the Answers.com results for the same query.   –Mr. Delaney is a staff reporter in The Wall Street Journal’s San Francisco bureau. Write to Kevin J. Delaney at kevin.delaney@wsj.com35

One of the great things about going to a lot of international web 2.0 conferences with prominent tech analysts and well-known entrepreneurs is that you can learn a lot from really impressive and experienced people, if you are willing to listen. When you tie that into the fact that the combination of money (from investors and Neotec) and an interesting project helps you recruit top talent and a kick-ass advisory board/group of investors (Didac Giribets, Albert Armengol, Juan Luis Hortelano and Joaquim Calaf), you can start to see how a concept (vertical search) transforms into a real company (migoa).

Case in point. In deciding our launch strategy we had two options that were the cause of intense debates:

• One approach is to launch quickly, all over the world and then hope that the traffic and the advertisers will come to you. Some of our competitors have done this to varying degrees of success.
• The other approach is to launch more deliberately in specific countries with a clear sales and marketing strategy in each market and only after the product has been developed and adapted so that local users will see its obvious value.

In the end, we decided to follow the second approach. After all, as I repeat often on this blog: You only have one chance to make a first impression, so try to look pretty. Both VCs and potential strategic partners want to see that you are able to realise “inspired execution”. (I’m borrowing the term from a blog that I read recently, but I don’t remember which one.) Of course, they want you to dominate the world, but they want you to do it one step at a time, with a clear plan in mind and with an aspiration to excellence. And when you’re working with limited resources, it’s essential to prioritise.

In plain English, this means that in a winner-takes-all environment like the Internet the key is to have a product that demonstrates relatively quickly that it is a potential winner. But please note the emphasis on “relatively”. The goal should not be to push out a rushed, poorly conceived product just to show that you can do it first; the goal should be to create something that’s built to last — something that can justifiably be described as innovative, better than the competition, scaleable, and most importantly, that takes the users’ needs and wants fully into account.

We’ve been lucky that a lot of VCs, tech analysts, traditional media companies and other entrepreneurs have been willing to push us to define the nuances of our strategy. The feedback has really helped us to hone our game plan before launching. I emphasise this point, because after launching it becomes a lot more difficult to change your business plan and product. So while it’s important to be flexible and willing to adapt to changing market conditions and opportunities, it’s also important to have some sort of vision before dedicating substantial resources only to find out later that you’ve gone in the wrong direction.

Some people have complained that we are taking too long to launch migoa. My view is that we should launch when the product is ready, not when the blogging and analyst communities demand it. In my humble opinion, a lot of our competitors launched too early and are so confident that they are already out of public beta. But most of their products don’t inspire me, and it’ll be interesting to see if their users disagree with my assessment. After all, I’m hardly impartial. In fact, I’m sure that a lot of our competitors will only improve their products with time, particularly if they get (more) funding, but the key question is whether they’ll be able to recapture users who were turned off after the first visit. Only time will tell.

In terms of what we’re doing at migoa, we are focused on creating brands for each vertical (we’re focused on three verticals — real estate, jobs and cars). Migoa will continue to be the umbrella brand for all of our vertical search products, but each vertical will have a separate identity. To choose the name for the first vertical that we will launch, we got the entire team involved in the process. Everyone could submit as many names as they wanted, as long as the relevant domain names were available. I was happy to see that the team took the task seriously! For about 24 hours, we were all on godaddy.com testing out our skills as naming experts.

This little exercise helped to demonstrate the good and bad of democracy in action. On the one hand, you get lots of candidates and, if you’re lucky, the active participation of all members of the team. On the other hand, there is the risk that a compromise candidate wins, instead of the most brilliant and original candidate. In the case of our voting process, we saw a lot of varied candidates. Some names were real losers, but then again, each member of our team had very different theories for what makes a good name (hence, the danger of the compromise candidate). I even learned during the process that that are guides and companies specialised in naming that charge enormous sums of money. Who knew? In any case, there was one candidate that blew the competition away in each of the voting rounds, and it will be the name of our first vertical to be launched in September.

Unfortunately, I can only release the selected names once we have bought all the relevant domain names. But I’m guessing that issue should be resolved relatively quickly.

Today I attended a mini-conference sponsored by La Fundació Barcelona Digital called “Inversors en Projectes de Base Tecnológica”. In general, I think of this phrase as an oxymoron–that is, that the concept of “investor” and “technology-related project” seem to be contradictory, at least in Spain (in my experience). We’ve been lucky at migoa in that we’ve obtained money from both the government (Neotec) and from business angels (Albert Armengol and Didac Giribets). But I think that our experience is more the exception than the rule.

Surprisingly, Carlos Blanco was an eloquent defender of this proposition. I say “surprisingly” not because I don’t think that Carlos can be an eloquent defender of Internet projects, but because my very first encounter with him (and with other Internet entrepreneurs in Spain) was at a First Tuesday event where we went excitedly to meet other Internet entrepreneurs and where he ended up trying to convince us that our project didn’t have much merit and/or that we weren’t the adequate people to try to do it and/or that we didn’t know what we were talking about and/or that we should hire someone who did (he recommended Ivan Martinez who, as it would later turn out, is his new partner in Synerquia). Since then Carlos has attacked us publicly on one of Spain’s most-read tech blogs (Loogic) before we even began to be known in the blogosphere. He argued that we were silly because we thought the project would easily attain a lot of traffic, despite the competition of other classifieds portals, and that he WOULDN’T invest in us — the original emphasis was his. Even in the conference today, Carlos mentioned both Properazzi (as an example of a project with an international team) and Trovit (as an example of a project with international aspirations), but for some reason he’s not as generous about offering a kind word about our project. To each his own.

I must admit I find this approach somewhat shocking, because one would assume that the host of an entrepreneurial forum trying to help foment a favourable ecosystem for entrepreneurs would be objective publicly and not attack projects still in early development by young entrepreneurs (particularly if a few months later he’d announce that he’d invested in a potentially competitive project). If he doesn’t want to invest in us, that’s fine. We never asked him to. We’d never even spoken to him before the First Tuesday event. But in my opinion it’s counterproductive to the idea of First Tuesday that he felt the need to attack us publicly in this way, while completely misstating a conversation that developed over a couple of hours.

For the record — it was 4 months ago, so I only write this as an FYI — our view was that marketing is a challenge for any Internet project — even YouTube had trouble garnering initial traffic. But we didn’t feel the need to spell out our entire marketing strategy at a public event with someone who was attacking us and who we weren’t courting as a potential investor. In addition, we admitted publicly at that event that any VC that invested in us would probably want us to hire a senior of VP of sales and marketing–that’s how Ivan’s name came up–and we mentioned that we’d been meeting with potential candidates long BEFORE the First Tuesday event. In fact, the “A” in GOA stands for an initial business partner who in fact is a Marketing Director of a multinational company with a large presence in Barcelona. When the time came to start working full-time in migoa, he decided that he’d prefer to keep his current job. In short, marketing has ALWAYS been one of our priorities.

For our part, we’ve been quite happy with our efforts to date. You always want to do more, and you always feel afterwards that you could have done it better. But more than anything, we believe in ourselves. Plus I think that we’ve done a decent job at getting our message out there. Time will tell who was right, but I really could care less about proving that we were right vis-a-vis an Internet personality. My job is to make migoa.com successful by proving that we offer a better alternative than our competitors.

Anyway, based on his harsh and in my view unwarranted, unprovoked and unjustified public attack of our project, I’m not always so disposed to give Carlos Blanco the benefit of the doubt. But I found myself agreeing with a lot of what he had to say today. Again, I don’t always agree with his personal style (which seems to be to attack rather than to seek the readily available diplomatic alternative), but if nothing else it often makes him the centre of attention (which might be the point) and in any case livens up sometimes monotonous conferences. So we all knew we were in for a treat when he began a comment noting, in not so many words, that VCs (venture capitalists / fondos de capital riesgo) that want patents and other intellectual property protections only do so because they are unaware of how things really function in the Internet world. On the one hand, I could empathise with the target of his comment — Ferran Lemus, board member (consejero delegado) of HighGrowth (one of Catalunya’s most prominent VCs). Ferran seems like a kind, elegant, diplomatic gentleman but it was obvious that he was very, very annoyed by what was perceived by many in the audience as an almost personal attack — you could hear the murmurs, snickers and whispers from the audience members. And I, like Ferran, didn’t enjoy being called “ignorant” or “unaware of how the Internet world works” — or otherwise being targeted –by Carlos in front of the rest of the world and without any obvious provocation.

There is no Internet “God” in Spain, which with few exceptions is still light years behind what’s going on in the US. Even when I’ve met with successful serial entrepreneurs with amazing CVs who are multimillionaires in the US, they’re gracious and helpful, rather than attacking and condescending. They have nothing to prove to me or to anyone else. Their success speaks for itself. For example, we met with David Risher, once Senior VP of Sales and Marketing at Amazon during its start-up and early expansion phase (and before that a senior executive at Microsoft in the early 90s) when he first came to Barcelona, and he agreed to meet with us based solely on an email invitation, invited us to a coffee (at Starbucks, of course), gave us pointers (we admit that we still have a lot to learn, and even more 1 year ago!!) and introduced us to other useful contacts who had years of experience in successful Internet projects and in fact contemplated investing in our project / joining the team as a founder to occupy the role of director of sales and marketing. Suffice it to say that the person we talked with about joining our team is a prominent member of the Spanish Internet community and runs one of Spain’s most successful and international Internet businesses (and has done so for most of its history since the Internet bust in 2000), but he was the kind of person that we went to dinner with him and his wife and spoke about a mix of ITunes, IVideos, American television, Britney Spears, Spanish entrepreneurial culture and racial politics — all over 2 pitchers of cava sangria and with a lot of “buen rollo”. With this person and with David, our conversations focused on how we could and should structure our marketing efforts, and these conversations began long BEFORE we attended the First Tuesday event in which Carlos attacked us. From what I hear, I’m not the only one to receive such treatment from either David or Carlos.

For the sake of full disclosure, I must admit that I am quite fond of HighGrowth. They paid for our trip to Helsinki, where we presented at the Easy Conference. They served as our coach and mentor there. And they have always been very kind and supportive of our project. I think that they are one of the VCs in Spain with which I’d feel most comfortable entering into some sort of agreement. They’re not sharks. They’re real people. And they tend to ask us hard questions that force us to advance our own understanding of our own business, but they find a way to do it without being condescending.

That being said, in my humble opinion, Carlos was right in two points he made with which Ferran disagreed:

• that Spanish VCs still have a huge learning curve, particularly when it comes to the Internet; and
• that Grupo Intercom is a great Spanish success story, but perhaps they shouldn’t be used as a filter for all Internet projects.

As for the first point, many Spanish VCs and business angels with whom I have met DO focus a lot more on intellectual property protections than their foreign counterparts. Most ask many hard questions, but knowledge of the Internet sector is not generally as deep or as experienced in Spain as it might be in London or in other European capitals. It is particularly true that investors without prior experience in the Internet space — or whose experience seems to come mostly from reading horror stories in newspapers about the Internet bust 7 very long years ago — don’t fully take into account that intellectual propery doesn’t need to be an Internet company’s most important asset or key to success. (Note, for example, that Google’s annual statements reveal that Google pays a license fee to Stanford for their search technology and they pay some sort of fee to Overture for their advertising technology. This doesn’t make Google any less of a tech company. Likewise, what patents do YouTube or MySpace or Facebook have that are key to their success?) Moreover, a lot of start-ups simply don’t have excess capital to invest in intellectual property protections.

By contrast, when we meet with foreign VCs, most ask three key questions: i) why is your team better than your competitors; ii) how is your product different and better than your competitors’; and iii) do you have traffic to demonstrate that you might become the market leader in your chosen markets? The focus is on beating the competition by hook or by crook, and intellectual property undoubtedly has a role there. But team, product and traffic/market are the key elements. And while they always ask about our technology, the focus is not so much on intellectual property (what legal protections do you have for your technology?) as it is on product differentiation (why is your technology better?).

Secondly, given their relative lack of comfort with Internet projects a lot of Spanish VCs appear to use their connections with some of the founders of Grupo Intercom as a filter for Internet projects, which might inadvertently serve an incubating function for Grupo Intercom (which in itself is a start-up incubator, with the difference that they often require that they are majority shareholders of the start-up and their initial investment cap is quite limited — less than €500.000 if I remember correctly). Antonio Barros is involved in many ventures related to online classifieds, from Bonsai Venture Capital to Grupo Intercom to connections of varying degrees with various business angel groups, and Antonio is personally one of the nicest people that I’ve met in the Spanish Internet space — he always remembers your name and your last conversation, and he always seems pleasant and willing to share his experience without being condescending. And in all fairness, Infojobs is still arguably the most successful Spanish Internet product, with proven turnover and success. Even Schibsted, the online classifieds giant in Europe, refers to Infojobs as one of their star products in all of their portfolio. And when we went to the First Tuesday event on online classifieds at the beginning of the month (Carlos didn’t invite us to present), most of the speakers had some connection to Intercom and/or Anuntis (Infojob’s parent company) — that is, Intercom and Anuntis have generated a new breed of entrepreneurs who think that they can do it better than their mentors at Intercom.

All of this is wonderful for the Spanish Internet space, particularly with regard to the online classifieds sector.

But Oriol and I were unpleasantly surprised when we first started speaking with business angels and investors, and then found out that many of them were discussing our business plans with their friends at Intercom. OK, it’s well-known that most VCs don’t sign NDAs (non-disclosure agreements), but they shouldn’t speak about our product with a potential competitor (depending on how you define competition) or strategic partner that we hadn’t yet approached. Either they are business angels/investors or they are incubators for Intercom, but there should be full disclosure at the beginning. Intercom should not be converted into the old-Testament “God” (God 1.0??) of Internet. We heard back from a few of these sources that the project was promising but that contacts at Intercom had said that it’d never work, if for no other reason than because Intercom would never allow us to crawl their site. (By the way, a lot of vertical search sites DO in fact crawl Infojobs, and the vertical search sites will generate more traffic for Infojobs — it’s free SEO. In any case, Intercom is no longer in control of Infojobs.) We were also told that the experts’ view was that the project was too ambitious in scope (which to me is a strange argument given that most VCs want you to become the next Google). It was therefore a bit surprising (not really, but . . . ) that we read recently on Loogic that Intercom is planning to launch a vertical search engine for jobs outside of Spain (a fact confirmed to us by Antonio at the recent Investment Forum sponsored by CIDEM).

Makes sense. When you see a potential competitor in the horizon, your first instinct is to kill him, not to help him grow stronger. And a lot of VCs senselessly give that God-like power of start-up life and death to Intercom and other “vanguards” of the Internet establishment who would prefer to kill technological innovation (and thus maintain their current competitive advantages) rather than foment competition and potentially die in the process. I can understand it from the web 1.0 company’s point of view. It makes less sense from the VC’s point of view, given that they are always complaining that they have too much money and not enough good projects. My view is that they should stop relying on outside web 1.0 “experts” with little interest in supporting future competitors (particularly, if these vanguard web 1.0 companies have little or no economic stake in such competitors) and focus on hiring and training internal staff that can be objective in their analyses.

As an aside, I think that La Caixa does a good job of this via Jesus Monleon, who is another experienced entrepreneur who has always been supportive — even defending us along with Walter Kobylanski against Carlos’s attacks on Loogic. Jesus is the entrepreneur’s friend and defender. He’s realistic without being condescending and without ever promising you anything. He just seems genuinely interested in fomenting a favourable ecosytem for entrepreneurs, and he never condescends to us, even as he gently urges us to launch soon.

In any case, I just ask that the business angels and VCs give us this information before they waste our time and give away potentially confidential information.

The other interesting comment from the conference was about the speed with which a start-up should launch. There is a frequent phrase here that “hay que correr” — you’ve gotta move fast, because the Internet world moves fast. I really liked the comment made by one of the entrepreneurs (I think it was Miguel Solá) when he noted that you’ve got to run, but you can only run once you’re fully prepared. The race is a marathon, not a sprint. In my humble opinion, a lot of Spanish Internet projects launch without fully having a product that can generate good word-of-mouth and without any apparent marketing/financing plan. They apparently do it for the pure love of the project, which is great, but not if the project isn’t sufficiently mature, ambitious or “prepared” enough. In my view, you’re only sowing the seeds for your own eventual demise. Most projects need financing if they are to reach their full potential, and access to financing only comes if you meet certain pre-conditions. In the US, there’s an expression that “you only have one chance to make a first impression”, and that’s been our motto. Other vertical search engines have taken different approaches to mixed results. Some still haven’t gotten material financing. Others have launched but have generated little buzz/user satisfaction. In the US, the time between starting a company and launching a public beta (at least in the vertical search space) was often quite significant (more than 1 year in most cases), so we’re not so frightened by the fact that we will launch later than a lot of our competitors. Our goal–and our duty–is simply to create something that will be worth the wait. If we can do that, both the buzz and the financing should come as logical (though not guaranteed) next steps.

The second day of Red Herring ushered in the presentation and panel section of the conference. Unfortunately, we did not make it to many presentations or panel discussions, because we had to prepare our own presentation, which was scheduled for 5:15PM. And from about 3:30PM to 5:00PM, we’d be meeting with various VCs with whom we’d scheduled meetings. So I was a bit nervous.

The conference really drove home that a lot of times, the better you are in your personal life, the freer and looser you are in your professional life. For example, on the day of our presentation, we got up at about 9AM. We were already freaking out. The developers and designers didn’t have the website up to the level that we felt comfortable with, and we wanted to show the website to the VCs with whom we’d scheduled meetings. It was really an issue of cleaning up some simple errors, but sometimes it seems that programmers don’t think with a marketing filter. In other words, it’s not always enough that something works. It should also be pretty and/or look user-friendly. And since the web wasn’t at the level that we’d agreed with the developers, we started to freak out a bit. So at first, I started chain-smoking. I really wanted to go the gym to burn off the nervous energy, but we didn’t have enough time. So I made a couple of phone calls to key friends / love interest who knew exactly how to calm me down. Nothing magical. Just a fun chat that distracted me for 15 minutes and led me to think about other things and put things in perspective. And then I felt calm.

So we met with one VC who succintly explained his theory to us: a successful start-up needs to demonstrate one of three things: i) an exceptional and experienced team; ii) a technology that is clearly above its peers; or iii) interesting traffic numbers. Nothing too surprising here, but the formula was so succint and clear that it really helped us to clarify our priorities.

I didn’t have much time to practice the presentation beforehand, but luckily 7 years of debate experience (high school and college) and 1 year of explaining the product meant that the presentation came off very smoothly. Once I start talking, I lose most of my nervousness. Usually, it’s the waiting that’s the worst thing. Once I get into it, it’s almost reflexsive. The goal is simply to have an interesting conversation with an audience without boring them to death and presenting the product in appealing but simple, layman’s terms.

After the presentation, a few more VCs came to speak with us, and various of the VCs with whom we’d scheduled meetings came to see our presentation. One seemed particularly interested. That made me happy.

Walking back to our hotel room from the presentation, we bumped into Andreas Rührig, the CEO of Wazap!, a vertical search engine for video games that is supported by two German VCs. Andreas’ company launched in 2006, but they already have impressive traffic numbers. Andreas was very nice, very friendly and very relaxed. He approached us after our presentation and told us that he also had a similar product. As a sign of his increased recognition within the search community, he was invited to be a Red Herring panelist to speak on the future of search. Andreas is definitely one to watch, not just because his product seems to be so successful, but also because he’s such a good guy.

At dinner that night, we were a lot more relaxed. We chose a random table of French entrepreneurs and just laughed and enjoyed ourselves. We had had a few more VC meetings, and after the dinner we went outside to smoke a cigarette and enjoy the view. We took some pictures with our mobile phones and one of me pretending to get into a Bentley convertible that was parked outside the hotel.

When we went back into the hotel, we went straight for the bar. A couple of VCs came to speak with us informally about our website, and their comments were very useful. I don’t what to get into too much detail, but suffice it to say that it’s astonishing the extent to which some VCs really condition their investments on the potential exit, even to the extent of redefining the product to faciliate an easier exit. We’re not really sure the extent to which we buy all of the arguments, but it was an interesting exercise nonetheless.

To me, the most fun part of the night came when we met Andrej Nabergoj, a successful Slovenian entrepreneur. We started speaking with Andrej, because he was standing next to us and introduced himself. I told him that I knew he had to be successful, because he was drinking a caipirinha, and given the price of my €18 Smirnoff Screwdriver, I could only imagine what a caipirinha must cost. So he invited me to a caipirinha and that set off a 3-hour discussion about VCs, entrepreneurs and staying true to yourself and your project. I remember one VC saying that he didn’t know where or when, but he knew that eventually he wanted to invest in one of Andrej’s companies, because Andrej is carismatic, very obviously intelligent but down-to-earth. He is definitely one to watch.

The New York Times reported yesterday that Microsoft will buy a health vertical search engine called Medstory. The “intelligent” search engine looks for health information using a database of information aggregated from medical journals, government documents and the Internet in general.

The terms of the sale were not disclosed.

As Peter Neupert, vice president for health strategy at Microsoft, notes: “Clearly,” Mr. Neupert said, “search is a critical part of that better end-to-end experience for consumers.”

Microsoft’s eventual goal is to link personal information like age, sex, family history, etc. to search so that search results are tailored individually and can identify treatments, drug interactions and interesting articles in medical journal.

“Health search could be way more relevant,” says Neupert. “You don’t need to see thousands of results. What you want to know is, what does this mean to me personally?”

This is the same basic question that ALL vertical search engines attempt to address. And as Richard MacManus points out, the acquisition of Medstory is part of a larger web trend: the continued rise of vertical search. Interestingly, he argues that Microsoft’s main interest in Medstory could be that Microsoft wants to enter and dominate the vertical search engine niche for health before Google has a chance to get its foot in.