Disruptive Collarity Compass™ Delivers Better Results Based on User Interactions with Content Instead of Links, Tags or Popularity
Palo Alto, CA - November 6, 2006 - Collarity, Inc., a search technology provider leveraging the knowledge of Web users, today marked the official launch of the company with the unveiling of Collarity Compass™, the industry's first search technology that automatically ranks information based on the implicit interests of individuals and dynamically created communities of searchers to improve relevancy. The new technology gives publishers, who integrate the compass into their site, the ability to offer their consumers unprecedented control to cut through a world of superabundant information and find the narrow slice of the Web that is personally useful and interesting to them.
"Collarity joins the emerging field of social search players, but does so in a way that overcomes the traditional challenge of getting users to actively contribute content or identify their interests," said Michael Boland, senior analyst with The Kelsey Group. "The Collarity Compass is a user-centric tool that can boost the utility of any website by intrinsically identifying users' interests and accordingly increasing the relevance of their search results. It has the potential to increase traffic and incremental ad revenue for any web publisher."
Collarity's power comes from the Compass' ability to automatically cluster natural implicit communities of subject-matter experts and to optionally provide users with "wisdom of my crowd" help from other "like-minded" searchers. The Collarity Compass enables publishers to deliver more effective site and Web search results by providing each visitor with the power to automatically define what is most relevant for them and provide search guidance for future searchers. Every visitor on a publisher's site becomes both an information provider and an information consumer. Every user's searches accrue to the benefit of every other user. As site visitors search, the system automatically and anonymously gathers, organizes and shares search knowledge.
"Our O'Reilly Radar team spots trends by watching the 'alpha geeks'," said Roger Magoulas, research director, O'Reilly Media. "Collarity offers a compelling new tool for understanding those alpha geeks by organically organizing and defining relationships between them, based on search activity. Collarity Compass represents a jump in search technology that leverages personal and community behavior to improve the relevancy of search results."
Collarity tightly couples content relevancy and site search to improve user satisfaction at a time when consumer satisfaction with news and information Web sites is dropping. An August 2006 survey conducted by the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan showed that consumer satisfaction with news and information Web sites dropped to an all-time low since satisfaction was first measured in 2002. Other independent research has shown that search plays a big role in consumer satisfaction. Of companies surveyed by Forrester Research, 90% said that search is the number one means of navigation on their site.[1] In a separate study by Jupiter Research, 82% of respondents said that visitors relied on site search to find the information they need.[2]
While a site's Web visitors search, the Collarity Compass creates a real-time dialog, automatically streaming relevant keywords and URLs based on the knowledge and successful search history of millions of other searchers. Collarity's patented new technology represents a breakthrough for Web publishers seeking to better monetize content, build customer loyalty, and understand the likes and dislikes of their unique audience. It lets publishers find new revenue streams and charge higher CPMs because content and ads are served based on the feedback of their Web visitors.
"The idea of basing search relevance on user actions is as old as search itself," said Levy Cohen, CEO and Founder of Collarity. "John Battelle described it better than anyone else in his bestselling book, The Search, when he wrote, 'Engines that leverage clickstreams will make link analysis-based search (nearly all of commercial search today) look like something out of the Precambrian era.' Collarity is conceptually similar to what Battelle describes as the 'data base of intentions' in his book and it puts relevancy back in the hands of the individual."
Collarity is delivered as a hosted Web service overlay to a Web publisher's existing information architecture and can be up and running in hours, instead of weeks or months. In addition, there is no up-front licensing fee for publishers with Web sites supported by advertising.
In conjunction with the launch, Collarity is participating in a number of industry events this week where people can learn more about the company's technology, as well as see it in action. First, Collarity's CTO and Co-Founder, Emil Ismalon, will be presenting today at 1:15 p.m. EST, at ad:tech New York (www.ad-tech.com) as a member of "The Search Evolution: How Social Search is Changing all the Rules" session, along with representatives from MSN, Technorati, and Kinetic Results. Also on Wednesday, November 8, Collarity has been selected to present at the Launch: Silicon Valley event, (www.LaunchSiliconValley.org) being hosted by Microsoft in Mountain View, Calif.
Collarity Compass is a free Web service for consumers, and is generally available in beta for consumer and publisher testing at www.collarity.com. Consumers can register for the Compass service and immediately benefit from the implicit personalization features that help improve search result relevancy.
Collarity is an Internet search technology provider based on knowledge of the user. Collarity's patented community search technology, Collarity Compass™, is the only technology that automatically tailors each search to the specific interests of the individual based on their implicit search behavior. Publishers large and small use Collarity's technology to continuously gauge their audience's interests so they can provide highly relevant content. Collarity is a privately held company based in Palo Alto, Calif. Please visit www.collarity.com for more information.
[1] Specialize Your Site's Search, Forrester
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