Stephen Chao is co-founder and CEO of WonderHowTo.com

People love to query HowTo. In fact, it is the number one query out there. Bill Tancer, general manager of the internet research firm, Hitwise, in his 2008 book Click summarizes: “‘How to’ queries represented nearly 3% of all search queries in the United States, making it the most commonly searched question, and for that matter phrase, entered into search engines.”

Why are there so many players? First of all, there is the natural duplication of text and video. Text is an older and more established medium of the internet. Ehow, About, and Wikihow have been pounding at this area of specialized search for quite some time. More recently, video publishers like Videojug and Howcast, as the arrivistes, have burst onto the scene – with all the attendant baggage. More expensive to produce, a remarkably different medium than text in that Marshall McCluhan way, funky meta data, and frustratingly different SEO rules all conspire to perpetuate this segregation. If you add up all the page views of video HowTo and compare that to all the page views of text HowTo, you will notice an enormous disparity. How this disparity plays out in the coming months and years is a matter of speculation and intelligent arbitrage.

My particular view is that video will rival (and possibly overshadow) text some day, not because I have any rational stats to back up my hunch, but mostly because I feel like ‘watching’ the answer to many HowTo queries rather than reading them. That is as much science as I care to impose on the debate. But remember, we are in the first inning of the internet-video game: the next eight innings will define the outcome.

Does the HowTo space warrant a dedicated search engine? Or will Google per se organize the great results of HowTo space? Great as this company is, Google cannot aspire to be all things to all people.  AltSearchEngines observes this truth every day. Niche search engines are permanent additions to the internet landscape. In the how-to space there are many Balkan Republics, which makes the task of organizing this ’space’ inherently challenging, and a great opportunity for a company like ours.

WonderHowTo.com is the only niche search engine of the HowTo space: every day we link to more than 1900 specialty sites and 225,000 video tutorials. We happen to draw from the totality of the web, and firmly embrace the notion that the collective imagination is better than any single development staff. Beyond WonderHowTo, most everyone else in the HowTo space falls into the category of publisher or portal. We
index and curate: we do not produce, host, or stream.

So long as the internet audience remains intellectually curious, and continues to type in ‘HowTo’ with such frequency, we think we will continue to have jobs.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 at 2:46 pm and is filed under CEO Views, Guest Authors, Verticals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.