From the San Francisco Chronicle
Startup takes Internet search to next vertical level
By Kristen V. Brown
Kevin O'Connor, founder of FindTheBest.com, reflexively corrects anyone who refers to his company as a search engine.
"It's a research engine," said O'Connor. "Or a comparison engine."...
O'Connor founded FindTheBest in 2009 after selling his ad network, DoubleClick, to Google for $3.1 billion two years earlier....
A Comscore report last year found that searches on such topical sites have surged 8 percent while they have declined 3 percent on traditional services.
"The pattern we are seeing is that people find search systems that let them focus on their main interests or within specific online communities," said Ray Larson, a professor at UC Berkeley's School of Information. "I suspect that part of the reason that these niche search systems are springing up is that nobody can afford to compete with Google head-to-head, but for specialized markets they can get some traction."...
For a site like FindTheBest to ultimately succeed, it must have "two key ingredients: good data and meaningful search results," said Marti Hearst, a Web search expert [and information professor] at UC Berkeley....