Getting results

Hong Kong start-up Verbase set to challenge giants Google and Baidu, promising users searches free from spam and advertisementsIn the fast-developing internet industry, the incumbent leaders are well aware that consumer tastes can change and more nimble competitors are just around the corner.迷你倉Before Google became the undisputed internet search kingpin in the past decade, the market leaders were industry pioneers that included Lycos, Infoseek, AltaVista, Overture and Yahoo.In 2009, software giant Microsoft tossed its hat into the general internet search arena with Bing, which promised more relevant search results.Verbase, a Hong Kong start-up formed by an American entrepreneur, will step into that same arena next Monday, when its namesake web search engine is unveiled to challenge Google and eventually, mainland online search giant Baidu.Antoine Sorel Neron, the founder and chief executive of Verbase, said the new search service was designed to relieve internet users' frustration with the advertising, spam and irrelevant results found in most online searches."Today's search engines are inherently flawed due to a business model that is geared towards maximising advertising revenue instead of delivering the best results to users," Neron said."Verbase empowers users, allowing them to determine what shows up first, while ensuring the integrity of the search experience by excluding ads and spam from results."He described Verbase as "a semantic search engine", which is set up to improve the accuracy of searches by understanding the context and meaning of the user's keyword.The service uses Yahoo's application programming interface (API) for gathering search results. "We are paying for the use of Yahoo's API. We refashion the data we get by filtering out spam sites and using our own algorithm," Neron said.He developed Verbase's so-called "passive user-ranking" algorithm, which takes into account how various users have engaged with the list of search results when ranking which ones are the most relevant.Verbase is currently in beta testing and has more than 50,000 unique monthly visitors to its site."What Verbase does is find out which results other users have found to be relevant for a keyword typed by a user," Neron said.That means the top-listed search results are based on what real users find most interesting and rele文件倉ant, compared with other search engines that mix advertising with search results."The next person entering the same keyword will see a different set of results based on your search," he said. "So we're changing the algorithm's results hundreds of times a day."Verbase, however, is not against advertising. It plans to introduce advertising on the right panel of its search results page, instead of at the top as with search results from Google and other search engines.Daniel Freedman, the founder of Jasomi Networks and a former vice-president of security products at McAfee, is an early Verbase user who found that its approach to search "keeps results pure and free of clutter".Freedman said: "While other search engines excel at retrieving results quickly, Verbase saves users time by effectively filtering out irrelevant listings for a particular query."Verbase is part of the privately held Palladium Group, which Neron established in Hong Kong in 2006. Palladium set up about 10 websites dedicated to medical devices and pharmaceutical products, which allowed Neron to raise the initial capital used to fund Verbase's operations."I took Palladium from zero to eight-figure revenue in less than two years," he said. "I had the idea of Verbase in 2006, but I didn't seek out funding because I wanted to control the project."Verbase was founded in 2011. Neron hired developers from Russia to do the coding while he focused on financing and the big picture. He has invested about US$120,000 in the project."Some people think I'm crazy trying to compete with Google. But in the first few years of Google, it wasn't the most popular search engine. That company went through a lot of trial and error to get where it is today," Neron said.The US$22 billion internet search market, however, has also seen a number of promising start-ups go bust. Cuil – pronounced "cool" – raised US$33 million from venture capitalists and launched in 2008 with about 120 billion Web pages indexed, three times more than any other search engine at the time. It was shut down in 2010 after reaching a peak of about 0.2 per cent share of the global market in 2008.Neron is more optimistic about Verbase. He said the service was already making plans to set up shop in Palo Alto, California, to target US users and launch an alternative Chinese-language search service on China.存倉