Snap: Is This Really a Better Way to Search? - Snap Anywhere
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If you are a website owner, one cool factor is their search bar. After you edit the JavaScript to turn it off for outbound links on your site, it looks a lot like the one www.ask.com offers apart from the name and the preview option. You can place the search bar on your site. You can find some cool Snap lookalikes on http://www.devhardware.com/. I wonder who did it first, Ask or Snap.
One really cool factor is that you can open the web site you want on the preview pane, instead of moving off of the search engine site and hitting the back button when you wan to check other listings. When it comes to "cool," Eric Schmidt and his Stanford grads may have to pass the title to these Cal Tech-powered geeks. Google, move over.
The Price of Cool
I started using Snap in the good days. According to some reviews, Snap was actually slower than it is today. This is amazing because the first time I used it on a 115 Kbps dial up modem, it took literally forever to load listings after I typed in my query. I am pretty sure it loaded under twenty seconds, but since I wasn't waiting around for it to load, I had already put the same queries to Google, Ask, and Bloglines and gotten results before checking. Google and Ask returned results at warp speed.
I was warned by several sites that Snap is for "broadband users," but I ignored the warning as is my habit and plowed on undaunted. I finally laid my hands on a high speed connection the next day (100 mbps), and it was all right. Still, I wondered: is cutting off close to half the market really worth being "cool"?
I am predicting that by 2010 most users (70 percent) will be on some form of broadband connection, 3G CDMA EVDO for mobiles, Wi-fi and Wi-max or some other new technology. Until such a utopia exists, however, how long does Snap intend to hold out? We are talking about three years, an eternity in Internet time. Will Snap's current customer base support it through the slug fest that the other major search engines put newbies through?
How Snap Will Compete
Snap is different from other search engines; it is actually "alternative." With its graphical-preview-based SERPs and its behavioral-laced algorithms, it has not one but two differentiating factors from the rest of the market. It is also certain to win its target audience, namely "visually oriented broadband users who want an alternative," no matter what the competition does.
In a sense, then, Snap does not really have any direct competitor on those two fronts. However it may soon see its behavioral algorithms being duplicated by Yahoo with "Panama." And it may start to lose advertisers as they jump ship and spend their hard earned advertising dollars where the eyeballs are.
Bill Gross has proved that he has incredible foresight before with Overture and the first pay per click model. Now with algorithms which also take user data into consideration, he may have started a bandwagon which the other search engines may seek to improve on. If they do not, it is probable they will just buy him out for another few billion dollars.
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