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Glick Clicks Over to Become, “…the next generation of search”.
By Jim Hedger, StepForth News Editor, StepForth Placement Inc.
April 1, 2005
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Jon Glick is in the house. Become.com, the new shopping focused vertical
search engine, sent out a press release last Tuesday officially announcing
the addition of Jon Glick to their team. He’s actually been in their
house since Groundhog Day but delayed the announcement so his hiring or
presence wouldn’t overshadow the launch of Become.com’s public
beta version in mid-March.
Jon Glick was the guy who whipped AltaVista, AllTheWeb, and the Inktomi
database into Yahoo’s proprietary search engine when he was the Senior
Manager of Search at Yahoo. Now, he is in charge of building a search tool
he believes will alter the way search engine users relate to information
and its retrieval.
Become.com is, arguably, the most prominent new example of a vertical search
engine; a sub-section of search Glick expects will be increasingly adopted
by search users. Unlike its traditional cousins Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask
Jeeves, Become.com has a “…laser focus on shopping and buying
decisions.” As an example, Glick asked me during a telephone interview
to use the keyword “Television” at Google and Become. Ten different
TV networks comprised the first page of Google results. Given the generality
of the query, the results are more than acceptable, with a notable exception.
If I were a consumer looking to purchase a television, the organic results
Google returned would be of little use to me. The paid AdWords results on
the right of screen were fully comprised of product information and, if
I were actually looking to purchase a television, would have returned results
more relevant to my intent. Become.com wishes to serve similar product-driven
results in its organic (free) listings.
Like his new employer, Glick believes that consumers are ill served by
traditional search engines. His task at Yahoo was to break Google’s
hegemony in the search market, a goal that involved planting seeds (merging
all Yahoo search divisions) and helping to open the field to others such
as Ask Jeeves and MSN. While Google continues to dominate, its virtual monopoly
has been breached. He left Yahoo because he “… wanted to work
on the next generation of search technology.” Vertical search, in
Glick’s world, is the next big thing.
Verticalization is all about targeting a topic. Since Become.com is all
about shopping and consumer information, it is easier to gauge the context
of search queries. When a search is conducted at Become.com, the searcher
wants to buy something. In other words, the search engine is not being assumptive
when it presents a thousand and one web sites pushing products when I type
in “television”. When you go into a building that is clearly
marked “SHOPPING”, is a salesperson assumptive in approaching
you? Traditional search engines, in the eyes of the vertical sector are
clearly marked “LIBRARY” or “GENERAL INFORMATION”.
Having worked the other side of the fence at Yahoo, Glick recalls the difficulties
in striving to best assume the context of unique search queries.
The challenge of contextualization is one of the biggest issues in search.
The Internet is becoming a much more complex environment as it evolves and
Glick doesn’t believe the traditional search engines are really ready
for the sector-segmentation he thinks will develop as the various web communities
organize themselves. “Google Page Rank and Kleinberg derived algorithms
that look at links. What they don’t do well is look at the context
within the page. It is very difficult to contextualize with older search
systems.”
Become has developed a newer algorithm it calls AIR (Affinity Index Ranking).
According to Become’s Chief Technical Officer, Yeogirl Yun, “AIR
is significantly more advanced than that hilltop algorithm [Google]. AIR
evaluates connectivity between all pages in a given topic. Rather than focusing
on "top of the hill" sites, AIR understands the overall network
of sites within a topical area. Both in-links and out-links are evaluated
to understand the level of interconnection among the sites. Advanced mathematics
and concepts from Applied Physics and Engineering Dynamics are used to calculate
specific scores.” [ed note: Become.com plans to publish a plain-language
version of this statement when it leaves the BETA stage in mid-April but
refuses to elaborate at this point.] Glick sees AIR as the “…next
generation of analysis past Page Rank.”
Websites are included in Become’s database via spidering, much as
they are introduced to the databases of Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask Jeeves.
Webmasters will likely have noticed incidents of Become’s spiders
in their logs in recent weeks.
Become.com will be out-of-BETA in mid-April. It has been operational in
the last stage of its beta-phase for about seven weeks now and is open for
use by registered users. When it leaves beta, the mandatory registration
will be lifted. Currently Become does not use profiling to tailor results
though the option will be open to users in the future with the introduction
of features such as a personal Wish List that will fetch information for
consumers as it becomes available online.
Become.com will also limit itself to serving the United States market for
the present time though it has pre-reserved domain names for expansion internationally.
Its technology is universally scalable and could be used for other forms
of vertical search beyond a focus on shopping. As it expands, Become is
rumoured to be developing products and features designed to directly compete
with features offered by Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search tools.
This has been an exciting first quarter with great changes continuing at
a breakneck pace. 2005 is turning into another Year-of-the-Startup and those
years have a way of introducing fundamental changes to the Internet environment.
It is obviously an exciting time for Jon Glick and his new colleagues at
Become.com, “Become, as a new company being able to start with fresh
technology, has the ability to change search paradigms people have been
using for past six years. We wish to change way people relate to search
and search engines.”
The jury is still out on the impact the concept Vertical Search will
have on consumer behaviours and search engine advertisers. I suspect
that regardless of the fate of a concept, SEOs and SEMs will become
very interested in understanding Affinity Index Ranking as it’s
full-release version is about to become the brains behind the veil
at Become.com.
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