“Search marketing is only at 10 percent of its potential size.”
Geoff Ramsey, CEO eMarketer, Search Engine Strategies, NYC 2006

"Circling back to our goal of perfect search, imagine that nearly every subject worthy of some critical mass of human intent – from archaeology to automobiles, zoology to pop music – receives a vertical search treatment. It's not such a leap to imagine, in the end, that we get closer to perfect search through the concerned efforts of thousands of smaller sites making their domain more perfect."
John Battelle, The Search

"It really doesn't matter how big the database is," said Jupiter Research analyst Gary Stein. "It only matters if you can find what you're looking for." In surveys asking consumers what they view as most important about search engines, "size never gets clicked," said Stein.

About MetaMojo.com - History

MetaMojo.com is a domain-specific, vertical search engine.

The original concept of MetaMojo.com was conceived in 2000 by an employee at a meta-search engine. In 2000, he left the search engine industry and entered the world of online publishing.

Recognizing the inefficiency and ineffectiveness between many search results and search queries and combining his experiences in search and publishing, he began to devise the foundation that went on to become MetaMojo.com.

Unlike other search tools that try to scour the entire Web to return results in a relatively haphazard order, MetaMojo.com would return results from limited, pre-screened and best-of-breed domain-specific sources based on the category of the search query for countless vertical topics.

Once search technology companies opened up their APIs in early 2005, the time was right to develop the iniital version of the MetaMojo.com search application. Yahoo! opened up its search API in February and by March, MetaMojo.com was born. Check out the original design.

In 2006, the decision was made to invest and develop a proprietary index and crawler and replace the Yahoo! API-powered engine. October 17th, 2006, MetaMojo.com was relaunched as a stand-alone, independent search engine.

About MetaMojo.com - Ten Principal Tenets

Tenet #1 - Context is King: not all search queries are identical

Is content king? Maybe, but probably, context is king.

A student looking for historical information on Berlin is hoping to find one set of results whereas a couple planning their honeymoon to Berlin is expecting an altogether different set of results. There is absolutely no way for any search technology firm to understand the searcher's state of mind at the time of the search. MetaMojo.com does so in a very simple manner: it actually lets the user dictate its state of mind: if you want travel, you click on travel; if you want history, you click on history. This is very different than simply searching for "Berlin + Travel" versus "Berlin + History" because the Web is more elaborate than that and the content found online and on web pages is too chaotic.

The numbing amount of information and websites make searching - even on the best search engines - a daunting task. An analyst researching information on a company like Sun Microsystems is looking for a different search experience than someone who is looking for information on Sun's technology.

In this example, searchers should have the choice to differentiate their search nature without having to add additional keywords in the search box; it is up to the search provider to differentiate the context of the search query based on the searcher's intention and state of mind.

The search application should base the relevancy of its results on different set of sources.

Tenet #2 - Relevancy is Relative: there should never be one search engine for all searches

When you search for information on Audi in even the best of search engines (Yahoo! or Google or MSN), you tend to get every single Audi website in every country imaginable. That is wonderful. But about people who search for what experts Audi have to say about Audi?

Look at MetaMojo.com's results page for Audi. But don't worry, we also give you the official site, but only one of them.

Tenet #3 - The Principle of Specialization applies to the World Wide Web as well

A best-of-breed publisher may not be best at search engine optimization (SEO). Recognizing this, MetaMojo.com retrieves limited, concise and relevant results from best-of-breed publishers for each given query based on the context of the search in question. This way, even if an online publisher fails at SEO, they do not fail in delivering great content to users of the MetaMojo.com search tool.

Suppose you need to research a band, a sports club, or an artist. Do you want fan sites included in the mix? Probably not. MetaMojo.com recognizes this. Compare the top result from Google with that from MetaMojo.com for artists for example.

MetaMojo.com also adds the top web result based on traditional algorithms to ensure that official sites pop up atop all other results. Even though realistically, a researcher, student or general searcher might want the unbiased and objective content coming from a publisher and not the squeaky clean data on an official site (think of the Audi example above, but replace Audi with the Ford Pinto).

Tenet #4 - The 3 C's: Content, Commerce, Community

For starters, Content should not take a beating at the hands of Commerce.

Commercial results have skewed search engine's results. After all, affiliate marketing programs have led to most websites linking to the same commercial results (think Amazon.com); as such, these web results tend to rise in link popularity and subsequently rise to the top of a search engine's relevancy meter. However, these commercial results may not be the best results, just the most popular under current algorithms. Yet, web searchers tend to get a plethora of commercial results atop the first page of results.

MetaMojo.com actually goes against the grain to return content-rich results atop its search results. However, it will offer commercial results around the content ones to offer an optimal set of results.

Over time, MetaMojo.com's users will create a Community that will add to the database of sources and dictate which sources are most relevant.

Tenet #5 - A human touch is required to weave through the Web

History repeats itself: first you had directories, then search engines, then portals... then, helped by Google's popularity, portals began to think once again of search engines, skipping over directories. Why? Because traditional directories were too labor-intensive and were topic-specific, returning a mish-mash of results in no clear order.

MetaMojo.com returns results in a source-specific order to provide searchers with the Web's best. While some aspects of MetaMojo.com's search methodology is labor-intensive, that is required to make the Web's information accessible and available to surfers who are not experts at searching. But once categories are set up, the MetaMojo.com database can very quickly scale.

Tenet #6 - Search companies are on the wrong path to Personalization

Personalizing the search experience will mean allowing individual searchers to define what is relevant to them - then and there - and not trying to link future search queries to previous ones. So long as search companies take that path, they will never profit from the potential of personalized search.

MetaMojo.com is currently developing a simple but effective personalization tool.

Tenet #7 - Relevancy may be finite

There is no need to index 1 billion web pages - let alone 8 or 20 billion - most of the data on the Web is redundant and overlapping (unfortunately). As such, by restricting results to best-of-breed publishers, a user can experience a positive search experience despite the limited source base. Furthermore by simply adding commercial text links around the content-based search results, you complement one with another and optimize the overall relevancy of the search results. Regardless, as the MetaMojo.com community grows, so will its source database. Think of Wikipedia.org's explosive growth to imagine the possibilities.

Tenet #8 - The vast majority of content on the Web lack credibility and accuracy

By having a human element in sorting which sources are relevant per category, MetaMojo.com is inadvertantly introducing some form of quality control over the resources that are used for each category of results. When a valuable source is missing, it can be added on the fly. Over time, this network effect will provide an audit or seal of approval that the information provided in the results are credible and accurate. This is a great advantage for parents, students, researchers and numerous others who need a certain amount of authenticity in the search results they obtain, without having to go on and subsequently research the source.

Tenet #9 - The Web is chaotic

True, some of the best sources online are hidden within the Web's billions of pages of content and may not be immediately available on MetaMojo.com, but the fact of the matter is that these results would probably not find themselves on the first search results page on MSN, Google or Yahoo! - where the vast majority of searches are conducted and the vast majority of clicks are yielded. However, if these sources produce good, reliable content, then they stand as much of a chance as any other web source to be listed at the top of MetaMojo.com's database, no matter how good or bad their SEO and link popularity.

Tenet #10 - The future of search lies in customization, personalization and democratization; where personalization refers to the ability to determine the user's state of mind at the time of search and customization refers to the ability to change a search tool to meet a searcher's future needs.

MetaMojo.com is striving to become the best personal and democratic search tool online. And therein lies the democratization of content online... and the method behind the madness of MetaMojo.com

But enough pontificating, start searching.