Or at least it would have if I had a PR firm and a few thousand dollars to get some coverage. But the code has gotten to the point where there’s a real, useful product (in my opinion, anyway ;-). If you’re not in the know, here’s the blurb from the home page.

SearchEkko is like a “related posts” widget for your blog, but it’s only visible to readers who arrive from a search engine. It uses each visitor’s search query to find the best-matching pages on your site.

So basically it uses visitors’ intent to help drive page views and provide a better user experience. There are some good comments over at Hacker News.

What now?

The next step is to actually get some distribution. It’s installed on about fifteen sites at this point, and it’s displaying on the order of 1,000 times a day. Nipping at the heels of ShareThis, right?

Tim Westergren, CEO of Pandora and a man I would have taken a bullet for until all these new audio ads, pitched 347 VCs before he got his second round of funding. 347. That is almost a week of non-stop, twenty-four-hours-a-day, PowerPoint pitching. But of course it was much worse than that, instead spreading across the collapse of the internet bubble and three soul-crushing years.

Anyway, if Tim can do that, then I should be able to hang in there for a few months of direct sales. So my goal is to email the 1,000 top business/tech blogs on Technorati, and then see where I am.

Wish me luck.

Update: Paul Stamatiou just alerted me to WP Greet Box, which offers a very similar product. Their targeting seems to be worse than that provided by Yahoo BOSS, but they have more features (naturally including some I’d been planning on doing). In any case, I’ll have to muse on SearchEkko’s future more. In the meantime you can read about competition at Jessica Mah’s blog.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 at 4:23 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.