Pagebull visual searching
Ralf Haller
December 16th, 2006
Recently we came across an interesting new search engine called Pagebull. Unlike other search tools pagebull gives you small screen shots of the page including any embedded frames so you can see whether it looks like its relevant or not. This is actually much better than the small text fragment approach of Google, Yahoo and co, but it comes at a cost: broadband is required, as is a modern browser.
The search results look to be fairly good and are certainly fresh - a check showed a page that had been updated an hour or two before the search was done and that updated page was the one displayed. I’m not clear if Pagebull is piggybacking off other search engines or if it is doing everything itself but it certainly serves search results in a different order to Google and seems (yes at great personal sacrifice I made a few dodgy queries to check) to have a fairly good porn censor filter - something that is obviously a requirement if you are serving up graphical pages to customers who may be in places where the viewing of certain images would be problematic.
I doubt it will be a competitor to google - but it might well be an acquisition target. Indeed pagebull looks like it could practically be the poster child for Robert X Cringely’s latest column where he discusses how the funding model for start ups has changed.
[..]we’ve entered the crazy era of AJAX and AJAX-related start-ups where a new hybrid rule set applies. Companies no longer need to raise lots of cash, no longer need lots of people, no longer need to even directly sell anything at all to be considered successful. They need revenue, of course, but that’s mainly through advertising. And they need to create something people want to use. But Super Bowl ads? Forget those.
Lately I’ve been interviewing experienced entrepreneurs from these earlier eras and for the most part they have jumped into the new way of doing things. Recently it was Jerry Kaplan and Robert Carr, who together raised and lost something like $80 million inventing pen computing in the 1990s and being destroyed in turn by Microsoft. Today each man has a self-funded start-up with a handful of workers. In Carr’s case, it is just he and his brother. Remember, this is the guy who led 250 developers at Autodesk to create AutoCAD 14 — the most successful release ever of the world’s number one CAD program. Now it is just Carr & Carr, and what’s weird is they’ll probably make more money as a twosome than Robert ever made at Autodesk.
What’s driving this phenomenon is a lot of technology at the right point in its development combined with a lot of rich nerds who cashed out of the dot-com era earlier than the rest of us and can therefore self-finance their new ventures. But most importantly what’s driving the new start-ups is the fact that broadband Internet is approaching ubiquity. This month 75 percent of Americans who have Internet service have broadband Internet service and that’s probably the tipping point for our Internet futures.