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November 28, 2006
Pagebull Launches - Visual Search Results
Christopher Muenchhoff, one of the two founding team members of Pagebull.com, wrote in to tell us his firm has launched its new search site that instead of a page of text links, delivers up screenshots of hits in response to a search query - if the websites have been produced using standard web formatting (Flash pages are an issue, for example).
Search For the alarm clock And You Can Learn A Lot Before You Click Thru
Icons in the lower left corner of each "hit" describes the site's contents and a Zoom icon provides a larger view of the page. It's a search engine that you would use when looking for a particular website, or a company, or a product's homepage, not necessarily when researching a topic or looking for tickets to the next U2 concert.
This is Muenchhoff's third venture. He co-founded Dealpilot.com in Germany back in the nineties, and subsequently sold a stake to Bertelsmann. Over the years it changed hands several times, finally ending up as eBay's Dealtime service. After that he founded a solar cell startup, but he closed it down in 2003 as he learned that a subsidies-driven business was not for him. He is also an angel investor in several German startups.
We asked a couple of our regular readers to take a look at the beta yesterday. (More below the jump)
The reactions were diverse. It takes about a minute to understand the search concept, especially if you have not been exposed to things like Ask.com's Binoculars feature. A minute or two can be perceived as a long time, we learned.
Another said it's great for finding out about a company - delivering an instant visual overview, displaying corporate blog, photos in Flickr, and the homepage, all in one page. But it is also clear that a broadband connection is required. A reader tried to access from China and had a slow response. And since he's a VC, he wonders how unique the underlying tech is and if a business can be built on the back of it without that differentiation.
We think it is a click reducing concept for the end user, and that it could also put a crimp in the traffic flow to sites that are set up to take advantage of people clicking through to them by accident. For the a:c that would not be a bad thing, actually - to lose some of the traffic from people looking for a "talking digital alarm clock" or a "rolling alarm clock".
As for the business behind such a tool, Muenchoff who is in the process of moving the venture and his family from Germany to Edinburgh, Scotland, says that he wants to see what kind of uptake it has, and then he can implement a traditional search biz model, such as sponsored links. The company is angel financed.
Posted on November 28, 2006 12:51 PM | Posted to Early stage | Permalink
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