The Jux2 metasearch engine sold on eBay for $101,000 last October, and its purchaser, Doug Baker, recently posted about his acquisition.
“Why? Well, the technology looked promising and I thought it would either become a great investment or a spectacular gaffe that would not soon be forgotten by my wife, friends, business partners, etc,” he said.
Baker envisioned applying the technology behind Jux2 to a particular vertical niche, in their case product research. He elaborated on this in the post:
So we used one of the core ideas from Jux2’s technology-content aggregation-and started working on a metasearch tool for consumer and expert product reviews. What came out of that is Wize.com and WizeRank, a score that represents the summary of expert and user reviews from hundreds of reliable sources.
On the Wize website, the company noted how WizeRank for a product can be earned, not purchased. The only thing that can improve a Wize Rank is more positive data collected from independent sources, the site said.
Wize carries contextual advertising, and links to purchase products as provided by eBay’s Shopping.com. It draws reviews from shopping sites like Amazon, Shopping.com, and Pricegrabber to help construct its WizeRank ratings.
“I’m still convinced that the purchase was a steal,” Baker said.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
