Can meta search engines gain a substantial foothold in the search engine arena?
Most meta-search engines use similar technology and there are few differences from one to the next. Infospace, the company that currently owns some of the largest and most comprehensive meta-searches, operates four separate meta-search engines that are basically the same with only small differences in their technology. Infospace and its related Meta searches take up around 1% of the search market, and bring in over $250 million in market revenue as of 2005 (Yahoo! Finance). There are numerous, tiny little start-ups and individuals bidding for the remaining search traffic.
Despite the competition, there are several small meta-search engines that make a large profit, like mamma.com: According to Yahoo! Finance, Mamma receives less than .1% of the searches, yet maintains a current market value of about $30 million dollars. Even a small meta-search engine like Juxt2.com, which was down for a year and operating totally illegally (scraping content from yahoo and Google without permission), when it was running, sold for over $100k on eBay. Thus the Meta search engine market is ripe for people to enter and exit.
Meta Search Engine Profile for Clusty.com
Name: Clusty (powered by Vivísmo, Inc)
Alexa Traffic Rating: 5,658
Market Value: Unknown. The company has not gone public.
Revenue Model: Advertising; pay-per-click; affiliate links and private search solutions.
Years in Business: Since 2000.
Strengths: Well-established; solid traffic base; first to use clustering technology; wide range of more specific searches available; large amount of traffic; use tabs to search for news, gossip, images, or products; options to search Wikipedia, blogs and Slashdot.
Meta Search Engine Profile for Search.com
Name: Search.com
Alexa Traffic Rating: 792
Market Value: They are part of a larger group of services offered by cnet.com. Cnet.com provides them as a small service; thus their monetary value is unknown.
Revenue Model: Pay per click and sponsored links. They are funded and offered as a bulk group of services.
Years in Business: At least five years.
Overall Competitiveness: Higher. They are one of the only Meta searches that cater to a more niche marketplace, and they continue to rise in traffic rankings.
Meta Search Engine Profile of Mamma.com
Name: Mamma.com, Inc.
Alexa Traffic Rank: 3, 157
Market Capital: 29.42 Million Dollars
Revenue Model: Based on advertising “provider of integrated marketing solutions to online advertisers.” Basically, pay per click.
Overall Competitiveness: They are a lumbering company that has shown almost no innovation since its initial launch. They have done a great job marketing though and will probably retain a large portion of the marketplace. They have existing branding and very valuable relationships with advertisers and publishers but are just now slowly developing specialized Meta search. It’s too little innovation, too late, and too slow.
Years in Business: Since 1996.
Profile of Meta Search Engine Surfwax.com
Name: SurfWax.com
Market Value: Unknown; the company has not yet gone public.
Revenue Model: Private search solutions; advertising; pay-per click; several “information management” tools.
Alexa Traffic Rank: 76,802
Overall Competitiveness: Somewhat competitive. They are trying to innovate and become more established, but are still very small and slow-moving.
Years in Business: Since 1998.
Strategy: They rely on advertising through arenas such as pay-per-click and other private search. They are basically using the same technology, such as clustering, as all the others but branding it and marketing it differently.
