Spotlight

The power of the right information

With a vision of building a team that delivers products for the global market, InfoSpace is all set to carve out a niche for itself through its R&D center. By Nikita Upadhyay

Founded in 1996 in Bellevue, Washington, USA, InfoSpace Inc commenced its operations in Bangalore, on June 26, 2007. It provides meta-search and private-label Internet search services for consumers and businesses. The company focuses upon providing people with the relevant and comprehensive search results.

Meta-search technology

“A study by IDC has found that the average time spent by Internet users online is 32.7 hours per week. This is almost one-and-a-half days in a week and 6.5 days in a month, wherein they just surf the Net searching for relevant information,” stated Srishti Sofat, Country Manager, India, InfoSpace Inc.

Meta-search engines operate on the premise that the Web is too large for any single search engine to index it all and that more comprehensive search results are obtainable by combining the results from several search engines. This also may save the user from having to use multiple search engines separately.

However, searching in every search engine and spending so much time can prove to be counterproductive. It becomes time consuming as well when a user does not find appropriate results. Through its meta-search engine, the organization provides users with appropriate search results. “Our meta-search technology transmits a search request to several individual and leading search engines like Google, Yahoo, Windows Live Search and Ask to provide the accumulated results from all of them,” added Sofat.

Search engines rely on proprietary mechanisms and algorithms. Meta-search engines leverage this fact to get results from a slew of standalone engines covering more of the Internet than a single search engine can. “With a proven scalable business model, 3.5 million unique users, and more than 100 distribution partners, we are well positioned for growth,” said Sofat.

Growth and products

Meta-search and private labeled business solutions are the principal focus of InfoSpace’s business. Under private labeled business solutions, the company has search and portal.

For consumer products, InfoSpace provides its users with the power to search up to 50% more of the Web than any other single engine. It does that through four branded search sites namely Dogpile, WebCrawler, MetaCrawler and WebFetch.

“For two years in a row, Dogpile has been rated the highest in overall customer satisfaction among Internet users based on ease of use, functionality and results. Arfie is our mascot in Dogpile, while Dogpile provides the Web results; Arfie makes Dogpile a fun and an exciting place to search,” stated Sofat.

In terms of business solutions, InfoSpace Private-Label Search develops, delivers, and hosts a white label Web search product for its business partners. This ensures that the partner’s brand identity takes center stage and the company’s solutions generate both revenue and brand equity with brand-free Web search product on the site. InfoSpace Private-Label Portal is a turnkey private-label solution that enables ISPs (Internet Service Providers) to provide a wide variety of integrated content and services to their subscribers. 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 e-mail, and more.

“While designing the site we customize sections like toolbars, vertical searches, are you looking for, recent searches, advanced search, search preferences, Web site match, etc,” said Sofat.

In 2007, InfoSpace’s revenues stood at $140 million.

Fixing DNS typos

The Domain Name System (DNS) is what allows your computer to locate the concerned Web server(s) when you type in a site’s address in your browser’s address bar. It is an Internet service that translates domain names into IP addresses. Because domain names are alphabetic, they are easier to remember. The Internet, however, works on IP addresses. Every time a domain name is used, a DNS service translates the name into the corresponding IP address. For example, the domain name www.example.com might translate to 198.105.232.4. The DNS system is, in fact, its own network. If one DNS server does not know how to translate a particular domain name, it asks another one, and so on, until it locates the correct IP address.

The DNS product developed by InfoSpace India’s R&D center for a German ISP automatically translates misspelled URLs into the correct ones; it helps the user save time from running into a page error. The revenue generated in all these products is on a pay per click basis.

These DNS tools are a set of server side applications that capture error traffic and provide end-users with a helpful set of suggestions for navigation. This is an early stage market and the company had had several trials in the US and Europe and are encouraged by the results. Research oriented development with C#.NET and SQL Server 2005 involves complex computing algorithms viz. information retrieval, data mining, fuzzy logic and machine learning techniques. They provide it at the ISP level. This helps in bringing DNS traffic to the browser.

Projects in hand

The Indian R&D center is currently working on three portal solutions for ISPs and all of them will be out in the third quarter of the year 2008.

The Indian center is the only R&D center that the company has outside the US. Within 12 months of starting its operations in India, the India R&D center has built two products end-to-end. “These projects are high level accomplishments for our India operations and we will continue to provide such products for our users,” pointed out Sofat.

InfoSpace India R&D center has developed a portal for Insight (www.insightbb.com). Insight communications is a broadband Internet provider that supplies service to more than 650,000 customers in Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio. The portal uses Web 2.0 on ASP.NET using AJAX (AJAX refers to a group of interrelated Web development techniques used for creating interactive Web applications or rich Internet applications built around JavaScript and other technologies). Insight’s new Web portal features user-defined tabs and drag-and-drop functionality making it easy for consumers to organize an engaging, personalized home page. The portal integrates with the search results.

Clients and organizational structure

For its customer products such as meta-search, the end-user is the customer as well the client. The client base for the company’s private label portal and DNS consists of ISPs in US, Canada and Europe.

The workforce for InfoSpace consists of engineering graduates and post-graduates. The company normally hires graduates and post-graduates from IITs, RECs and other tier-I engineering colleges. The R&D center in India consists of 17 engineers.

Working in a niche technology space means that there is no hierarchy or management-based growth path. The focus is more on career growth and opportunities in terms of experience and expertise in software development. The company uses an agile method of software development named SCRUM where each individual in the team is a stakeholder for the success of the product and has a say in shaping the product’s direction.

The vision of the company is that the products that it delivers should delight its partners, customers and shareholders.

Next up

InfoSpace set up an R&D centre in India to tap the huge resource and talent pool available in the country. As of now, the company is not planning to expand its verticals. Going forward, its focus would be to attract more customers to use its portal and meta-search engine. It is focusing on acquiring network traffic. For that, it plans to develop more portals in the future.

nikita.upadhyay@expressindia.com