Snap.com, GoTo Reincarnated With AJAX

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the not-competing-on-search dept

Bill Gross’ Snap.com search engine relaunched today, with some interesting features such as previews of a site before clicking. The most interesting change is it removes any distinction between paid links and normal search engine results, as they’re both grouped together. This is roughly the same model that Gross’ GoTo used so it’s not clear exactly where the innovation is. There’s nothing inherently wrong with bought links, though the question for Snap is whether the inclusion of sponsored links makes results better or worse. For example, suppose someone pays a lot of money to be the first result for the term “Techdirt”. The problem isn’t that this site has been slighted — no site has the right to be the number one result in a given search — but users will quickly realize that they’re getting low-quality search results. On the other hand, if somebody searches for “mortgages” it probably makes as much sense to send them to the highest bidder as it does to send them to whatever site has the best SEO, as they’re likely to find on Google. Snap’s challenge will be to prove that on net the paid-inclusion model will result in superior results, and this will determine whether they get people using their site. There’s a catch-22, however, as they probably won’t get much ad inventory (crucial to delivering good results in this way) until they get a certain critical mass of users. Most of Snap’s other innovations seem to be on the advertising end. For example, instead of Cost-Per-Click, they’re using Cost-Per-Action, meaning the advertiser only pays if the user actually buys something. This eliminates the problem of click fraud, but again does nothing to make the service more attractive for the consumer. What makes the search engine business challenging for competitors is that you can’t compete on price or any other service for advertisers; you have to get the users and then the advertisers will follow, regardless of the ad model. So unless Snap’s paid-inclusion model churns out superior results, or users flock to their AJAXy results with page previews, it seems that their efforts are likely to prove futile.