InfoSpace aims to provide best search results

Search Engines

InfoSpace aims to provide best search results

The ultimate goal of a search engine is to provide the end user with the most relevant results for their query says, Srishti Sofat, InfoSpace

Abhigna N G

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

BANGALORE, INDIA: Accessing millions of web pages in not an easy job for any IT professional to search for a specify information.

Srishti Sofat, country manager, InfoSpace India

Srishti Sofat, country manager, InfoSpace India

Today, as we see the tremendous changes in the search engine space, lot of companies are actively involved in coming up with user friendly tools, most relevant results for user query, regional languages search, Metasearch technology and other features which are helpful to common man.

No single search engine covers the entire Internet. Different engines use different technologies and thus draw different results from the vast pool of available information. Posting query and waiting for information to throw up with accurate results is a big task for a search engine.

In an interaction with CIOL, Srishti Sofat, country manager, InfoSpace India, talked about the kind of technology InfoSpace is using in search engine technology and What meta tags should be used for search engine optimization for better search results. She also talked about the increase in Internet traffic despite of economy slowdown. Excerpts:

CIOL: How InfoSpace search engine technology is different from your competitors?

Srishti Sofat: The Internet has seen a flood of many search engines over the years, Google being the most prominent one. Searching in all these respective search engines & spending so much of time can prove to be quite cumbersome and time-consuming when the user does not find appropriate results for his search.

Being a Metasearch engine, InfoSpace provides users the best of the best search results. InfoSpace’s metasearch technology enables it to transmit the search of the end user to several individual and leading search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Windows Live Search, and Ask, to provide the accumulated result from all of them.

To elaborate the same, InfoSpace has tied up with Google, Yahoo!, Windows Live Search, etc. to provide its users the best search results. So when a user does search on InfoSpace’s search engine the search query is automatically sent to Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.

While all the above search engines provide the results to InfoSpace, InfoSpace’s unique metasearch technology selects the best of the best results/ the most relevant results from each of these engines and provides the same to its users. With InfoSpace’s metasearch technology, the users get the most relevant results while not spending hours’ together surfing the net.

CIOL: Can you name some of the technology innovations when it comes to search engine?

SS: The ultimate goal of a search engine is to provide the end user with the most relevant results for their query. There have been innovations on relevancy algorithms such as the Page Rank technology used by Google. The Metasearch technology, where searching multiple data sources in real time is done and the best results are provided to the end user.

Semantic web is an area to understand user intent better where in Ontologies are used to provide a formal description of concepts, terms, and relationships within a given knowledge domain. Natural Language Processing is another area focused on user intent analysis.

CIOL: One of the biggest questions about search engines is regarding the use of the Meta tags. What Meta tags should be used for search engine optimization?

SS: The search engines use a combination of content to determine what pages make it to their result set based on the query terms. Content on the page, the page title, the meta tags being important aspects of their algorithm. It’s important to note that the Metasearch technology is not linked to the Meta tags on pages.

Metasearch engines enable users to enter search criteria once and access several search engines simultaneously. Metasearch engines operate on the premise that the Web is too large for any one search engine to index it all and that more comprehensive search results can be obtained by combining the results from several search engines. This also may save the user from having to use multiple search engines separately.

CIOL: According to a recent study, Google is poised to get stronger in search engine market. What InfoSpace is doing in order to maintain and grow in search engine market?

SS: Google is definitely a brand. InfoSpace differentiates itself with its Metasearch technology. Currently there are only 15+ Metasearch Engines all over the world, like Brainboost, Clusty, Dogpile, Mamma, MetaCrawler, Myriad Search, WebCrawler, WebFetch, etc. Among these Dogpile, MetaCrawler, WebCrawler and WebFetch belong to InfoSpace.

CIOL: Despite the economy slowdown, how do you see net traffic increasing?

SS: The Internet today is used as a tool for discovery, research, communication and efficiency. The economic slowdown brings the need for more of the above not less.

CIOL: What are the products that have been developed in Indian R&D center?

SS: At InfoSpace’s R&D center, two products have been developed. One is the private label portal and the other being DNS Assist.

Private Label Portal
InfoSpace Private-Label Portal is a robust turnkey private-label solution that enables ISPs (Internet Service Providers) to provide a wide variety of integrated content and services uniquely targeted to their consumers. An Ajax-based personalized start page offers ISPs a vehicle for communication and provides users a portal dashboard experience for easy access to news, weather, stocks, personal email, and more.

Portal is our distribution product. To explain in layman’s terms, these days internet service providers spend considerable amount of time and money on their home page, so as to attract users to spend time on their home page and generate traffic. We design the home page for them; we even put our search box inside it. That counts beneficial for us and the partner in terms of revenue.

The portal product was launched for 2 ISPs in the US, Windstream Communications and Verizon.

DNS Error Assist Service
InfoSpace provides a comprehensive solution to enhance and monetize ISP traffic generated by navigational errors encountered through mistyped or "dead" URLs. On receiving DNS errors, the solution provides an enhanced private-label search results page based on the term entered to help quickly and safely navigate without requiring any additional downloads.

InfoSpace's DNS Error Assist Service automatically corrects common typos. It presents the end user with recommendations for correct domain name, along with useful related search terms and search results for corrected domain names.

This solution has been deployed with several Internet Service Providers in Europe and US.

CIOL: Who are your search engine partners?

SS: The prime purpose of a Metasearch engine is to provide an accumulated and precise search result to the end users. To enable this, a tie-up with all the major search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Windows Live Search, and Ask was essential. Such a wide search renders the search result more reliability and credibility.

Also one vital point is, no two search engines at any given point of time yield the same results, considering this what meta search does is, it congregates the results from the various sites & provides users the best of the best results. Hence it makes the experience of searching simple and hassle-free.

Since InfoSpace has partnered with these sites, this partnership helps it in driving traffic into its branded websites:

* Dogpile
* WebCrawler
* MetaCrawler
* WebFetch

©CIOL Bureau