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We've been working really hard on our startup and now this
21–30 of 77 posts
Re: We've been working really hard on our startup and now this
#22I imagine that you had to have known this would happen sooner or later so my advice would be not to sweat it too much. You decided to enter a niche market that was basically only a niche market because the major players had chosen to overlook it. At any time they had the resources available to move in and you can bet that if you had become popular they would have come along to eat your lunch. If anything, this may even put you in a better position because now you've really got a fire under your ass to do something to separate your product from theirs. There's also the possibility that if you garner enough attention you'll be acquired.
P.S. Very neat search engine. I especially like the ActionScript view.
Re: We've been working really hard on our startup and now this
#23This sounds like a sensible feature for Google or Yahoo, but you need to think about who would really need to search Flash content - as you suggest on your site, perhaps the Flash Developer community is your likely audience. So do deals with sites involving that.
The point is that very few general users are going to give up on Google results and think "I wonder if what I'm looking for happens to be in a Flash file somewhere". Of course, if it's thrown in for free with Google results then it might be used by general users, but not on its own.
And there are plenty of other new directions that people have suggested for your technology. Probably the best to see a return on your investment so far would be to provide precisely the feature that Google have announced to the second tier of search engines.
Re: We've been working really hard on our startup and now this
#24And we are in process of a re-design. I have to wonder if I should keep working on it...
The cynic in me says your f'ed. You'll definitely have to repurpose because they have much too much inertia. Once flash search results start showing up in my google results, it'll be like, "oh, thats handy". I can't imagine myself using your site just for flash searches.
Actually, I think you're being too generous - I can't see myself using a separate Flash search engine even if Google does NOT also index Flash. As above, you need to think who your target niche really is.
Re: We've been working really hard on our startup and now this
#25wow your market just got validated by the major players - this is no reason to stop, you do however need to push forward on a specific niche - this can be seen a major set back or opportunity - likely there is a lot of buzz on this announcement. maybe you can great some adwords adds against the news story keywords and get folks that are excited about this server to try our your site first.
Validated by players that are very likely to crush any start-up into oblivion. I wouldn't be too excited ;).
I had this happen to me with my last startup right around the time we were dealing with some angel investors.
Every single of one of them called me to say "Well, Microsoft is going to be doing this now, we don't want to throw our money away."
It's one thing to have market validation by companies you could theoretically catch up to; it's an entirely different beast to try to compete with Google or Microsoft.
Re: We've been working really hard on our startup and now this
#26That's good and that's bad. It's bad because it means you'll have to move much faster to get your site out the door. It's good because then that makes your site much more valuable as an acquisition for one of the large search engines that falls behind the leader in this space. Specifically, I would target trying to be acquired by Microsoft, Ask.com, or A9.
Don't be intimidated by Google and Yahoo! as they're both trying to juggle too many balls in the air at the moment to design something that does a great job at dealing with this specific type of web content. If your service is done well, I really don't think you'll have any problem with the acquition.
Re: We've been working really hard on our startup and now this
#27Ouch. I feel your pain.
It's probably too late to help much but when I look at product initiatives my first criteria to do something that is never going to show up on the shelves at Wal Mart and that none of the big boys like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Apple, etc. would ever consider doing.
Re: We've been working really hard on our startup and now this
#28Hi there. I'm the other founder of the site (Troy made the original post on this thread) and I sent a "Hey, we're doing that too" email to the VP of Yahoo search and the VP of Google search this morning regarding SWF search. Still haven't heard anything back from them as of this post though. Also, we were denied VC funding earlier this year for this same project. Does anyone think that now is a good time to re-submit…
Can you make the case that your solution is better than what Adobe and Yahoo or Google engineers have put together? (If not, I'm not sure why you're mailing companies already strategically linked with Adobe's solution.)
I wouldn't count on Adobe limiting access to this special player to just Google and Yahoo. Adobe wants Flash/Flex accessible by all crawlers, so it's just a matter of time.
Re: We've been working really hard on our startup and now this
#29There are also open-source projects for reading (and thus finding the text and links inside) SWF files -- see Gnash, JavaSWF, and others. So there's a practical cap on how much other crawl/search teams would pay for such technology, unless you've got something really advanced.
Re: We've been working really hard on our startup and now this
#30Consider licensing your search tech to companies not blessed by Adobe? (I.e., other than Google / Yahoo!) I know my company would be interested.
Sure, we'd be very interested.
Notice that what they are suggesting is the key component of your solution (taking links from a page and producing the parts to index) not the indexing itself or the search term parsing &c. I think if you offered that aspect (as a web server or licensed, shared-source software) then you could carve out a good nice whithout having to rebuild the rest of the "search" infrastructure. Basicly, I am suggesting that you forget about
"Our search results are not very good right now. We are in the very early startup phase of our website. The crawler has only been crawling for a while, we only have crawled a handfull of websites, and our search query technology is only in the keyword phase. All of these things require time and money to implement. As things progress we'll improve our infrastructure and ramp-up as quickly as we can."
and focus on what you are apparently good at.