A short exchange with Tobias Peggs of OneRiot:

Q: Which  search strategies do you think hold the most potential for advertisers/marketers?

OneRiot: Firstly, advertisers/marketers will benefit from being where the users are. And increasingly that is realtime search. Industry stats suggest that 40% of searches would be best answered by results from realtime search engines (these are people trying to find out “what’s going right now” for something as heavyweight as “Iran Election” or as entertaining as “Britney Spears”). Stats aside, you can see the stellar growth of services like Twitter (which shows you the conversation around a query) and OneRiot (which shows you fresh, socially-relevant web content related to the query) underlining that fact.

Secondly, advertisers/marketers will benefit from a particular user behavior found on realtime search engines. That is: users tend to search many more times per day for the same query than they do on a traditional search engine. The reason is simple. On a realtime search engine, the results change in realtime to keep up with the latest news and buzz. So users keep searching to stay on top of the latest information. Therefore advertisers / marketers working with realtime search engines will be offered many more opportunities to monetize and/or engage the user during a day.

Q: From a business perspective, how difficult is it to actually get a viable engine?

OneRiot: It’s difficult. Firstly you have to address a user need that is not met adequately by the big traditional search engines. Realtime search does that. Users want it, and traditional search engines struggle to deliver it. So users are actively looking for alternative solutions that meet the need – and we’re able to satisfy that.

But secondly you need to deliver a very good “search baseline” just to meet the users basic expectations of a search engine. For example, all searchers expect clean titles, spam and porn filters, fast page return times, the ability to scale and handle multi-millions of queries per day, etc. Users have come to expect all this and more from a search engine – so yours needs to deliver that *and* deliver a compelling and differentiated experience.

We have a clearly differentiated product that serves a distinct need in the market, that comes with a great “search baseline”. All of these are critical elements to success.

Q: What kind of $ is needed for R&D before launch? SearchMe, for instance, reportedly had $44M and its CEO said it would take a total of $100M. Does that sound like it’s on target?

Clearly there’s a lot of investment required up front to build a search service that delivers relevant results, at speed and at scale. And that investment needs to continue – because the web you are indexing is always getting bigger and more interesting. However, once you’ve got a marketable product, the $ required to “launch” depends a lot on your Go-To-Market strategy.

Our approach is to grow the business by opening up an API which allows 3rd party developers to take our realtime search results to their users. For example, Microsoft uses our API in a “realtime version of IE” which is bundled with OneRiot search. Microsoft is now distributing this product from Microsoft.com – and we obviously get search traffic through that. We launched our API in June, and already have more than 40 partners in our program. It certainly requires an investment to make sure you have a robust partner API and support program, but in our opinion this is a robust approach to growth.

The key with building a search product is to understand the feedback loop with the users. The more people search with your service, the more you understand what they are looking for, and the more you can tune your engine to meet their needs. If you don’t have search volume initially, you can’t work that feedback loop and it’s hard to improve the underlying engine. By deciding to open our API, we’re getting that search query volume very quickly, and we’re able to work that feedback loop.

All of our users – whether at OneRiot.com, or whether they see our results presented on a partner site – benefit. Likewise, so would advertisers / marketers. Not only does a better product help drive user engagement (“eye balls”). But, when you get down to some search business specifics, the better targeted our search results are for a particular query, the better the potential is for advertisers / marketers to work with us and effectively monetize that.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 10th, 2009 at 3:08 pm and is filed under CEO Views, Guest Authors, Realtime. 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.