Search, Europe and the essential web [updated]

[ Last week was really busy, with Library House's essential web splitting the week in half. The first session was on one of my favorite topics: Search

The lineup of new search/vertical search engines were Quintura, Migoa, extate, trexy, garlik and the todeka project.

I caught up with Douglas of extate (pic on the left) the day before at the Atlas Venture event (thanks Fred!), and he'd let me know they would be announcing funding the following day. Glad to see that extate has raised initial funding- what these guys are trying to achieve is difficult and I wish them lots of luck...

A few key points worth drawing out of the session with the corp dev teams at Google, Yahoo and News Corp are: capital efficiency is king, build to run/profit don't build to flip plus a few things from their shopping list: geospatial apps, checkout and mobile.

The final point was the pervading theme throughout the event: Europe is hot, and London is hotter. ...and I couldn't agree more (after all, not living in the US was a conscious decision).

Elsewhere in the World of Search, I've been using lijit (now the default search engine on this site), Spock and last (but not least!) Mahalo (adding mahalo to firefox's search bar is dead easy tutorial here).

[Update]

Library House published their weekly newsletter yesterday which focused on the search companies at the essential web event. Newsletter available here.

Comments

[Jason Ball]

Eugene forwarded through the following:

"...check out www.intruders.tv, my new venture. We have interviewed
most of the search startups at the Essential Web. Their interviews will
be posted over the next couple of weeks!"

If you missed the event and are interested in some additional insight into these ventures, you might want to check out those videos.