"It's possible to compete against Google, and even beat it," said Quigo Technologies founder Yaron Galai at a Massachusetts Institute of Technology Enterprise Forum at Tel Aviv University.
Other panelists in the panel on Internet business models were Carmel Ventures general partner Rina Shainsky, Kasamba founder and CEO Inon Axel, My Things founder and CEO Benny Arbel, eSnips co-founder and CEO Yael Elish, and Adv. Zeev Fisher.
Galai said in his talk entitled "How to compete against Google and win", that he and his partners decided to found Quigo in 2000. "We couldn’t have asked for a worse time. At first we thought we'd contact search engines in order to offer ways to improve them, but we quickly realized that no one was interested," he said.
Galai added that, in 2003, business began to pick up. "Interesting things were going on in the market. Google acquired SemanText, which became AdSense, and Overture, a public company, signed a quite nice deal with us in an attempt to launch a product that would compete against Google. That's when venture capital funds began to show an interest in us."
Galai explained how he persuaded venture capital funds to invest in Quigo. "We realized that Google had a problem in its business model. Websites with good content subsidized websites with poor content. We wanted to solve this problem," he said. This was not the only problem and he explained how Quigo managed to crash the website of "USA Today" for six hours in 2005. "That was when we realized that we had to improve our product and the company's management systems."
Galai concluded, "Even a gorilla like Google has an Achilles heel, and the fact that there is one dominant player does not necessarily mean that the market is locked. One of the fundamental differences between us is that we're based on a real link with customers. Google develops algorithms instead of hiring customer relations staff."
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on December 26, 2007
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