The brains behind this powerhouse money-maker is Steve Kirsch, a native of Los Angeles. He has a B.S. and an M.S. in Electronic Engineering and Computer Science from MIT (well, no handicap there), and now runs one of the most successful companies on the Web. In fact, his home page draws 25,000,000 hit per day! That's a little more than half of all the traffic that comes to the Netscape home page every day, making them the second most popular site on the Internet.
InfoSeek is about to go public in the next couple of months and the expected value is around $500,000,000.00. One of the first round investors put in $60,000 and will receive approximately 40 times that (40 x $60,000 = $2,400,000.00— two-and-a-half million dollars, for the mathematically challenged) if the valuation is correct. If not—"oh well, close enough" would be a good place to live. This is Kirsch's third successful start-up. His previous accomplishments include Mouse Systems and Frame Technology Corporation, which he sold to Adobe for like kinds of money. (I told him to call me next time he starts a company.)
WWWiz: Netscape listed you, instead of Yahoo, as Net Search under Net Directory. What do you suppose was the thinking behind that?
S.K.: Net Search is more of a full text search, whereas Net Directory is just navigating the hierarchy; Yahoo is more the table of contents and InfoSeek is more of a search of the whole thing. One's sort of a browse model, the other's a search model. InfoSeek was clearly optimized for searching, whereas Yahoo was clearly optimized for browsing.
WWWiz: On InfoSeek, do you use things like robots to go out and find information, and bring Web information back, and put it into your index?
S.K.: Yes, we do.
WWWiz: So you don't just wait for people to submit information about their sites?
S.K.: Right, that's correct. We use a whole bunch of different techniques in order to get the URLs.
WWWiz: How did you decide to start the company? Did you write the software and buy the equipment, or did you team with some people?
S.K.: Well, I had an interest in the area, as a frustrated user, so I spent some time seeing if there were any better solutions than the ones you normally find in the market place. I found that there was some technology which seemed to be remarkably better than anything else tested on the same queries and on the same data base, and I thought, gee, by bringing something like this to market and making information inexpensive for people that there'd be a big market for this kind of stuff.
WWWiz: Did you fund it yourself, or just start in the garage, or...?
S.K.: No. Basically I used some of my own money, plus money contributed by some of the other founders, as well as outside investors.
WWWiz: Do you find that there are peak times at which people are searching your system?
S.K.: Oh, yeah.
WWWiz: What are the peak times?
S.K.: From about 10:00 to 2:00.
WWWiz: And do you track things like the kinds of people, what people are searching for the most, things like that?
S.K.: We track all the queries, yes.
WWWiz: So you keep statistics?
S.K.: Yes.
WWWiz: So what do people look for the most?
S.K.: The number-one query is sex.
WWWiz: Does it stand out way above everything?
S.K.: No. There are other ones that are popular.
WWWiz: What would be next after that?
S.K.: Let's see...let me look at the file. [long pause] Okay. Playboy. [laughs]
WWWiz: Hmmm. Okay. So you can tell how many searches were done on all of them individually, but you don't necessarily have them by categories, except the word "sex," for example?
S.K.: Right. I have single words, so things like "chat"—I'm going to weed out the erotica, 'cause almost every other one is erotica-related—well, not quite—games, ESPN, Pamela Anderson, music, weather, Microsoft, Netscape, Cindy Crawford, movies...
WWWiz: Is that kind of in order?
S.K.: Yes.
WWWiz: Interesting.
S.K.: Yes, "sports" ranks way down there. [laughs]
WWWiz: All right. That's the nerd set. [laughs]
S.K.: It's pretty funny what the actual list is when you look at the words that people use.
WWWiz: It would be interesting to publish just the first 50.
S.K.: Yeah...our PR institute was not keen on that idea. They said, "Gee, if you did that, then people would associate InfoSeek with sex and..." so we're real careful with that.
WWWiz: So, how big is your capability? What kind of connection do you have to the Internet?
S.K.: We have a single T3 line right now. We're getting a second one.
WWWiz: Wow. So you're actually managing to make a T3 completely busy. That's what five million hits does. Do you have an idea when the problem might be on the other end, how big the Internet can grow and how much bandwidth out there is available? I mean, are there some limits to that?
S.K.: I don't think so.
WWWiz: I mean, if the Internet doubles in size in the next quarter, is that going to be a problem?
S.K.: Well, I would imagine that just like highways, there are going to be some places that will experience some congestion because the necessary infrastructure's not in place. It's growing at a fairly rapid pace, and I'm not knowledgeable enough to really answer that question.
WWWiz: Okay. I thought with the kind of throughput you have you might be bumping into some of those things.
S.K.: Well, the point is, we wouldn't know it, because if someone connects from Europe, for example, we know the connection's slow, but a lot of that is just because of the number of lines we have between here and Europe. The speed of those lines. Australia is, like, one line. Maybe not. I'm not sure exactly what the Australian connection is.
WWWiz: How many people does it take to run your operation?
S.K.: We've got 50 people in the company right now.
WWWiz: I was sorting through your site today, and was wondering about how many advertisers you have currently.
S.K.: It's about 30 to 40. I think it's in the low forties.
WWWiz: And you were saying that most of that is done by salespeople making contacts, rather than connecting with people over the Internet?
S.K.: We get a lot of leads from people sending email to sponsors, and closing those leads usually necessitates a phone call. I think we get somewhere around 10 to 20 inquiries a day—people wanting to sponsor our site.
WWWiz: What's your price range?
S.K.: Good question. Let's see. From $2,500 to $40,000 a month, and you can also buy individual key words. A single key word is $1,000 a month.
WWWiz: What kind of key word does a person buy?
S.K.: They can buy anything they want. Oracle can buy "Sybase," and Sybase can buy "Oracle."
WWWiz: Got it. So $1,000 is one key word. You don't have a couple of key words that come under that?
S.K.: If you're a regular advertiser, then you get a certain number of key words free with your ad. So, if you spend $15,000 with us, then you also get three key words, and you can purchase up to seven more at $300 each. It's a little complicated.
WWWiz: There's some structure to it. How would you differentiate yourself from the other search engines, like Lycos, etc.?
S.K.: Oh, we're much better. [laughs] There are a number of ways that we differ. The most important is that we actually index the full text of the document, not just a few of the key words. We also index where the terms are located, so we can do proper name searches, whereas the other search engines can't. So if you're looking for "Don Hamilton," you could type in "Don Hamilton," just the way we see it, no query operators required, but you have to be careful to capitalize it, because you always capitalize it when you write your name. Most people when they type into the search engines, they don't take the small amount of extra effort to properly capitalize things, and so that sometimes lead to strange results.
A classic is the guy who typed in "who are the baby bells?" and he got back articles on "The Young and the Restless." Then he wrote an article on how InfoSeek gives him very strange search results, that have nothing to do with what he's searching for. So we checked what his search was, and when he wrote it in the article, he wrote "who are the Baby Bells?"—capital B, capital B—and when he actually typed it into InfoSeek, he typed it with a lowercase b. So the search engine thought he was asking about the kids that the Bells are having on "The Young and the Restless." It can't read his mind.
Another case is someone typing in the name "Bill Rose," and that's a person's name, but you can also get articles on how the treasury bill rose. So if I'm looking for the guy named Bill Rose, and I get articles on how the treasury bill rose today, I'm gonna say, "Gee, I was looking for this guy named Bill Rose and you guys gave me articles on treasuries. What does that have to do with anything?" The point is that case has a lot to do with helping to understand exactly what it is you're looking for, and most search engines, virtually all search engines except for ours, take case into account. We take case and proximity into account when doing searches.
WWWiz: So if I wanted to look for two random words that might appear in the same document, like Bosnia and something else, I'd just type the two without capitalizing them, or with, and it wouldn't necessarily put them together.
S.K.: Correct. If they're both capitalized, then you'd put a comma so it doesn't think that they're—
WWWiz: Okay, so you do put a comma in.
S.K.: Right. That's just to separate them.
WWWiz: Another thing here—I notice that you have under Cool Sites, which was mentioned the other night, weather, health, career, things like that. How do you pick those?
S.K.: We have a guy who we've assigned to surf the sites and pick out what he thinks is neat.
WWWiz: So he just hunts down interesting sites. It's not another thing someone buys as an advertisement.
S.K.: Not currently, but it could be.
WWWiz: It's probably better if it's not, though, because it makes them better. So what kind of arrangement do you have with Netscape? Suppose tomorrow they decide, "Okay, that button's off our screen."
S.K.: Well, it would get somewhat less traffic if that were to happen.
WWWiz: Do you have an agreement with them to stay there, or do you have options that you'd take if that happened? Is that something you've thought about?
S.K.: No, there's an agreement between the companies and that's also being extended right now.
WWWiz: So Netscape is benefiting, in addition to the customer. You're not giving them an additional benefit besides giving them this wonderful search engine on their screen.
S.K.: I think that the actual terms are confidential, but we both benefit, clearly.
WWWiz: Right. There's not a reason why they'd want to do something different. It appears that you rotate ads throughout your front page...
S.K.: Throughout the search results page, and also the front page.
WWWiz: So what happens when a person advertises is that they have a random number of times that they're on the front page?
S.K.: Basically the front page is all sort of random, based on how much they pay. So the more they pay, the higher their frequency. And if someone types in a search word that matches one of the key words that an advertiser has selected, then only an ad which matches that key word will appear. That way, if Microsoft places an ad on our site, if they type in "Microsoft" as a query, then they'll get a Microsoft ad, assuming that Microsoft was first and someone like Novell didn't buy the word "Microsoft."
WWWiz: Are you guys profitable yet?
S.K.: We're pretty close to profitability. We're adding people a little bit faster than we're growing our revenues.
WWWiz: I understand you have a more extensive service available for a fee?
S.K.: Yes, there's the professional service.
WWWiz: And what does the professional service do?
S.K.: That allows you to search a wider range of data bases. These are all commercial data bases. So, quite often you won't find what you're looking for on the Web, because someone hasn't posted that information for free.
WWWiz: Oh, so these would search things like maybe the Dow Jones list or something like that?
S.K.: Archives of news feeds, company profile information, reviews of software written in professional magazines, that wouldn't otherwise be available on the Net.
WWWiz: So what they're going to do is if they sign up to this they're paying you and then you somehow buy this ability to make the data base available to them?
S.K.: Yes.
WWWiz: And what kind of cost is that for people?
S.K.: The average bill is about ten dollars a month.
WWWiz: So that's pretty cheap.
S.K.: Yes. Very cheap.