Melzoo: Googzilla Killer or Googzilla Snack
January 13, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who sent me the link to the Melzoo.com Web search site. I poked around and located on VNUnet an article providing an overview of the service. You can read “MelZoo Takes on Google with Split Screen Search here. The system is a metasearch engine like Ixquick.com and Vivisimo’s Clusty.com. The metasearch technology is not the hook for Melzoo. The company generates an image of the Web site. I first saw this type of preview when I reviewed Girafa.com for my column in Information World Review five, maybe six years ago. Melzoo asserts here:
This preview feature has an enormous impact on the ‘quality of traffic’ delivered to advertisers: the traditional search engines are offering typically only text as a teaser. Chances are that users who enjoy the luxury of a detailed thumbnail preview, will be a lot more selective in visiting the sites they are interested in. This results in a higher effectiveness of use. The chances of “conversion” (i.e. from hit to buy) is currently estimated 5 times higher than with traditional search engines.
I think the vertical metasearch available from Deb Web Technologies is more useful for my work. You can see one of the DWT vertical federated search systems here.
The VNU write up made me sit up and take notice with its inclusion of this assertion in its write up of Melzoo.com:
“MelZoo has improved the experience of browsing the Internet in a totally different way. For years people have used an old technique – text only – to browse the web. MelZoo has revolutionized the way users will browse the web,” said MelZoo chief executive Alex De Backer. “In addition MelZoo is a welcome novelty for the advertisers, as it offers higher quality visitors at a lower cost.”
There are some issues associated with metasearch. These include latency, being blocked, or having to pay the source of the hits for the privilege of using its results. I will keep my eye on Melzoo.com.
Stephen Arnold, January 12, 2009
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I think the vertical metasearch available from Deb Web Technologies is more useful for my work. You can see one of the DWT vertical federated search systems here.
The here link goes to a porn site