New search engines set to challenge existing tools

There are 2 new search engines of note this month that are starting to attract press attention. Snap is a relaunched version of an old search tool, now offering a range of interesting features and display options. Zibb is a new business search engine developed by Reed Business Information and an example of a search tool focused at a ‘vertical’ search market.

Snap is a resurrected name in the search market and could just as easily be featured in our occasional ‘what ever happened to..’ articles. The original Snap was launched by CNET in 1997, initially as a search engine and then as its own directory of human-edited listings. Eventually renamed as NBCi to reflect its new owner, the site ultimately failed and was closed in early 2001.

Relaunched at the end of 2004, the ‘new’ Snap has been developed by a team headed by Bill Gross, who was the original founder of Overture and was also involved with Picasa before Google purchased the company. After a period in beta and undergoing a series of changes, Snap has now been launched as ‘the other way to search’, combining a search index from a number of sources, together with some original search features.

The main differences offered by Snap are that it anticipates the user’s search term by offering a drop-down list of suggestions. The results page is also more interactive and very visual, with images of the websites available to enable users to decide whether to visit them or not, either within a search window or in a new window. There are also a number of other tools and ‘widgets’ offered, which may prove too ‘gimmicky’ but ultimately the quality of the search results will count if it wants to build market share. Snap claims to achieve more relevant results by using an algorithm that reviews past behaviour of millions of users to tell which sites are visited more often, the average time users spend on each site, and whether or not they took any action.

Zibb is currently in beta format and is described as the ‘global business search engine’. It has been developed by Reed Business Information in partnership with FAST Search & Transfer, the Norwegian company behind the respected All The Web search engine that was taken over by Yahoo! in 2003.

The search index combines the extensive business data sources published by Reed, together with crawled data from other publishers’ content and other web content, so that data is ranked according to relevance. There are options to search within news stories, as well as products and suppliers (taken from Reed’s Kellysearch and Kompass databases) although the range of advanced search options are currently quite limited. Sponsored listings are included from Google.

If you’d like to know more about either of these new search engines and how the could be used to market your online business, please contact us for more details.

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