Bill Gross is trying to get on track to sleeping at night again after Google stole his Idealab-backed Goto.com (Overture)’s cost per click model of advertising. Goto.com was acquired for the nice, tidy sum of $1.6 billion by Yahoo!, but Google borrowed the model and now boasts a $140 billion market cap.
Bill Gross decided to move on and launched Snap.com (no relation to the original snap.com). Snap.com is essentially a search engine whose business model relies on charging clients on a CPA basis. Snap.com has gotten a lot of love from the press over the past months, but it has yet to set the search stage on fire.
Today we learn on PaidContent.org that AdWeek is reporting that former Excite and Altavista search man Jim Barnett is launching Turn, also a CPA player in search.
UPDATE: it should be noted, that Turn is not a search engine. for exactly what it is, click here.
Interestingly, search players are getting funding again: yesterday Powerset reported getting funding too, and at the risk of doing some shameless promotion, our very own MetaMojo.com (a domain specific vertical search engine is seeing an uptick of calls from interested parties in the past month), though I think the reason for that is that my belief that technology alone does not necessarily build a business is starting to reasonate with others. You need content to get people to interact with your technology products, otherwise, customer acquisition costs are too generate a decent profit.
Anyway, another reason why investors are again backing search entities is that while Google, Yahoo! and MSN are fighting the search wars, there is a lot of room for add-on’s, complementary applications that they can one day simply acquire and integrate into their own arsenals.
Of course, with the kind of money these search startups are raising ($12.5 M for Powerset on a large valuation), it will be hard to get decent buyout offers that make the investors make money, but hey, since they’re the “smart money” I am sure they have a master plan.
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