Search engine Dumbfind.com, which already gained some notoriety last year for an elegant two-box query+category approach, has now added contextual tags to the left of search results to suggest a host of additional search options. But of more interest to the search marketer, Dumbfind CEO Chris Seline told Murdok those tags will be up for advertising grabs in just a few short weeks-for free.
Seline said that Google serves up ads on about 50% of search results, leaving the other half uncovered. He plans to open up that unaddressed market offering contextual advertising where companies can bid on sets of tags.
A marketer wouldn’t have to bid on the keyword “Google” or “Yahoo,” for example, but could include the “search engine” in a set of tags and have an ad served up alongside related queries. Still in beta, Seline said advertisers could sign up for a set number of tabs at no charge, primarily because Dumbfind’s founder and CEO is looking for feedback from searchers and from marketers.
Sponsored results are already running at the top of SERPs, served up by SearchFeed.com’s ad network. Dumfind will continue their relationship with SearchFeed for their tagvertising concept.
Seline has a goal for Dumbfind.com in mind that involves more user input, a Web 2.0 direction that involves human hands. Soon the search engine will incorporate “folksonomy and tagsonomy,” part of an overall theme of “a more intuitive way to search.”
“Search Engine algorithms tend to be different than what users are thinking,” he said, alluding to a future that incorporates natural language processing and common sense.
Initially, the two-box query system, where users enter a general search query in one box and a second category query into a second box, brought Dumbfind.com some nice attention for the way it allows users to zero in on specific results. Adding tags with an additional related vocabulary (that a searcher may have not thought of) is a nice addition for increasing relevancy.
“With Dumbfind, if searchers want to find answers about musical opera, they could enter the word opera’ in the first keyword search box and plug in music’ for the second category box and obtain results quickly that are more relevant to what they’re looking for than by just searching by keyword. Dumbfind provides more options and flexibility. If searchers are inclined to put more intuition into their search, we also give them that opportunity.”
The function can be very useful for seeking specific (and often obscure) information. For example, an Ancient History student looking for information about the Oracle of Delphi, may run into a problem. Most of the information about the ancient seer focuses on worship of Apollo, dating back 3,000 years. However, there is information that the priestesses associated with Delphi originally worshipped an ancient fertility goddess. That prehistoric information is harder to find and thus a sub-query as well as tag clouds can be very useful to weed out Apollo sources.
Dumbfind has gotten some nice reviews on Amazon.com as well.
“For those of us who are very often frustrated by the fact that we just can’t find exactly what we are looking for on Yahoo, MSN or Google, Dumbfind’s innovative combination of a keyword and topic search can very often lead to exactly what you’re looking for,” writes Paul Murtagh.
