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Spotster’s New Search Engine
Spotster is announcing its new business search engine in beta.
By DAVID SIMS
TMCnet CRM Alert Columnist
Spotster, a company this reporter hadn’t heard of before, is releasing the beta of a new search engine today, one they describe as “targeted at the specific needs of business professionals looking for information within their industry.”
The search service creates “a comprehensive vertical industry web” that delivers search results to industry professionals. It’s live at http://www.spotster.net.
Spotster has introduced the service for three targeted industry segments including Customer Relationship Management, Integration & Web Services and Radio Frequency Identification.
Industry-specific search and research, Spotster officials claim, has become more difficult on traditional search engines -- Google, et al -- “which lack a focus on industry-specific sites.” There’s also all the search engine spam to wade through, irrelevant -- i.e. “paid for” -- sites cropping up high while genuinely useful, relevant sites are buried deep.
Shame, yes. What privately-funded, San Jose-based Spotster’s claiming to offer is a B2B-tuned search engine for targeted industry research by “dynamically creating and growing a vertical industry web of pages most relevant to a particular industry,” according to company officials, who describe the technology as capable of ensuring that “only the highly relevant web pages are included in its industry index.”
It also boasts the obligatory special search algorithm, in this case “tuned to deliver accurate results to the user.”
This reporter supposes it's trying to be like jayde.com, but less Yahoo!-ish and more Google-ish, less of a general clearinghouse and more of a targeted results provider. And whereas jayde.com, which bills itself "The B2B Search Engine" already looks pretty cluttered and commercially-driven, Spotster has the austere appearance of Google.
Vaibhav Domkundwar, Founder and “Chief Spotster” says a user who wants to look up “SAP NetWeaver” could hit Integration Spotster and find everything he needs to know. “A RFID company sales person looking for business contacts, say ‘Supply Chain’ contacts, within the RFID web can use contacts search within RFID Spotster to discover the contacts she was looking for,” Domkundwar explains.
Works for CRM too: “A CRM professional looking for ‘Salesforce.com customers’ can use CRM Spotster to spot the targeted results,” says Domkundwar.
The company encourages business users to experiment with the site and provide feedback -- it is, after all, still in beta.
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David Sims is contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles by David Sims, please visit:
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