GenieKnows: the Emerging Errand Efficiency Engine
As I mentioned in GenieKnows Builds an Index, my biggest initial take away from my conversation with Barbara Manning, President and CEO of GenieKnows and Mausam Prince Kalra, GK's Chief Technical Officer was the fact of the index itself and how GenieKnows, which has essentially been an ad-network, is now thrusting itself into the search/vertical destination space.

Also - early next week Manning says to watch for news of a significant GenieKnows Local partnership.

First, some basic GenieKnows info:
GK employees: 25
Total search engines in Canada: 2
Around since: 1999
Used ppc to stay afloat. Main focus is research.
currently getting 1 billion GK "searches" a month through its network
new features - spell check/proper suggestions (google, yahoo have this, MSN is not there)

Stats about the GenieKnows Local product:
Targeting top 100 cities in the US (for now).
Have around 1 billion pages w/local data and STILL CRAWLING.
Use ESRI for map data, but the layout and usability (how the map appears on the page) is all GenieKnows.
They organize index by hub and authority.
Will be using Ajax in later iterations.

The hidden value: Errand Efficiency
As we spoke it became evident that the piece Kalra and Manning were most excited about - the "neighbourhood" link on local results pages, was also the least-obviously useful.

The function enables users to see other local businesses in the vicinity of their initial search so that they can plan for greater errand efficiency.

In my mind, errand efficiency is HUGE. I'm an impatient errand runner, because, well, errands are a pain in the ass. If I can get local results that enable me to plan my route according to the greatest efficiency, well, NOW we're talking about local search that's really useful (not to mention profitable...).

The only problem with GenieKnows is that it's not evident, from a teensy link entitled "neighbourhood," that I can plan a whole afternoon's errands based on the location of a key destination.






(note tiny "Neighbourhood" link)

They have a LONG WAY TO GO when it comes to actually increasing my errand efficiency. For one thing, drilling down into categories is counter intuitive, and as a user I'd prefer to simply type in the keywords of the errands I have to do and let the planner go to work making things more efficient for me.








Still, I think this is an excellent first step towards errand efficiency, a local search function that would be VERY USEFUL to the local searcher. This is also the area I see them having the most potential synergy with PreFound.

GenieKnows on Mobile Devices
3 years ago Kalra and his cohorts at GenieKnows put forth a proposal for local search on mobile devices. GenieKnows is looking at ways so that folks can complete mobile transactions in 1 1/2 the time frame that it takes now.

Kalra feels particularly excited about the future of mobile: "it will definitely change how people shop - it allows people to shop from where ever they are - to make the determination to buy right at that point. This will change things in that people can do research and buy right away.

"In countries like China and India - mobile devices responsible for growth of the internet."

His focus is on keeping GenieKnows mobile device agnostic.

I didn't get a strong sense that there were local-to-mobile efforts.

GenieKnows Verticals Coming:
Continuing the push into the destination space, GenieKnows is working away at developing three key verticals. That you will have to wait and find out about because I can't remember if they said I could talk about them or not.

Unintelligible Notes that Seem Important:
I forget what question I asked, but here are notes that I believe indicate a strategy for enabling geo-specific contextual ads:

"we have our own network and receive backfill from other large networks
GenieKnows tech developed in house (intl w/yahoo (not NA) able to monetize intl traffic w/ one single xml feed - allow publishers to monetize intl traffic - geotargeting based on country level - puts italian ads on italian blogs for example. currently working to open relationship in china. Shang Hai Ad:Tech - sponsors at SES Shanghai)"

Note to self: put more notes in notes!

GenieKnows: Watch Closely!
At the end of a very engaging hour with Manning and Kalra, I came to see GenieKnows as a strong up and comer in the second/third tier search engine space. My concern for my new search friends is that with only 25 employees their seemingly wide array of projects will water down their overall value to the end user. Also, the errand efficiency concept would be quite simple to copy...

They've been sitting on search destination sidelines watching closely for 7 years though - I'm excited to see what new search tech they bring to the table!
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |