MAMMA Search Engine Mania
Mamma is a search engine from way, way back. They went public in the dot com frenzy and have been reduced to almost nothing since the dominance of Google, Yahoo and MSN in search engine land.But today they had a huge run-up in the stock market. MAMA on Nasdaq almost doubled, going from 2 dollars and change to over four dollars. What's up with Mamma.com?
I remember using Mamma a few times back in the late 1990's. They call themselves "The Mother of all Search Engines", which was a cute slogan back then but is a bit of a joke now. Like DogPile, Mamma goes out and combines search results from the other main search engines using their own quirky little formula.
The reason the stock took off dramatically today is because they've just announced they now offer video search capabilities.
What most people don't really understand about this press release, though, is that they've partnered with another company on this, and it is that second company that actually owns the video search engine.
This other company, Pixsy, has developed the "Pixsy Media Search Platform" and it seems that this is just a case of Mamma licensing with them for the right to use it on their site. The Pixsy video search could thus be used by any site that arranged a similar deal with Pixsy.So it seems that the really interesting company to watch here is Pixsy; not Mamma.
Pixsy runs their own video search site. They are a small private company. They don't reveal much about themselves on their website. Here is their entire About Us page;
We believe that images are more powerful than text and have developed a unique search engine that delivers only visual results, in the form of thumbnail images. We call this "visual search".
Pixsy collects visual material from thousands of providers across the web, resulting in millions of photos and videos for you to search and browse. Traditional image search engines take a mathematical approach to search, with the focus entirely on relevancy. With Pixsy, you can search for both photos and videos by relevance, category, provider or freshness.
As a meta-aggregator of visual material you can explore content from multiple providers with just one search query. Additionally, our visual search technology extracts photo and video content from RSS feeds, enabling us to deliver the freshest photos and videos to our users (browse the latest news photos, the latest sports photos, the latest celebrity photos, the latest funny videos, etc). We update our index to the minute so you can discover new material every time you visit.
Pixsy enables any website to run their own branded photo or video search engine, with their own content (if desired), at no cost. Media search engages users, create new traffic, and unlocks new ad inventory. For more information please visit our Partner section.
Our goal is to collect, index, and organize the millions of photos and videos being added to the Internet each day.
About Pixsy Corporation
Pixsy Corporation is a next-generation media search engine and private-label photo and video search provider with offices in San Francisco, CA and Seattle, WA. Pixsy owns and operates www.pixsy.com, a web-based visual search platform that powers private label image and video search engines for online publishers. According to Nielsen//NetRatings, image search is the fastest growing vertical search category on the Internet today. Pixsy was founded by a team of engineers and business leaders hailing from Microsoft, Sony, and ValueClick.
I happened to buy some Mamma stock yesterday, because it looked really good technically. But I sold it too early today, because I thought this news was not that significant to raise the value of the company substantially. However, I think I was very wrong about this. This story may get immense press coverage and that alone will raise Mamma's profile and may prompt many people to start using them as their search engine of choice. And there could be more news here to explain the rise in Mamma's stock price today. It's quite possible another company is looking to buy them out.
It was smart of Pixsy to license with Mamma. Mamma still ranks as the 2,700 most visited web site according to Alexa. This will make a very interesting story for Big Media to report on, and will greatly increase Pixsy's exposure and clout.
Does anyone know more about them and their video search capabilities? I think we may be hearing a lot more about Pixsy soon.
3 Comments:
Good story. Tried their search today and compared the result of what it found from youtube with youtube itself, the result wasn't nearly what you would find searching youtube itself. Plus there isn't a rating system so you get some kind of random list that you have no control over. With youtube and many other video sites you can refine your search of a video by either popularity, date, number of views, tags etc.
Overall this would be ok for my mama to use.
I too bought stock today and quickly sold for what I paid after my own tests of the site, but realized I sold too soon from my decision on fundamentals, but the stock right now is in it's irrational, frenzied, tulip mania stage. Once people actually start using the site they will just go back to real search engines and the actual video websites themselves. That is unless Mama.com can index ALL of youtubes videos and can seperate a search criteria rather than the user being subjected to whatever Mama tells you your going to get.
thanks for your note.
I decided to buy a little Sonic Foundry today, based on the technical move up. I have to keep my fingers crossed, I didn't do much research, but it seems they have the most sophisticated video search capabilities out there. That would make them a potential buyout target by the big search engines soon. Anyone know more about them? Their stock symbol is SOHO.
correction, i meant SOFO is the stock symbol for Sonic Foundry.
They've already had quite a huge appreciation this year, but the move in the last week and especially today seems to indicate they are going even higher soon.
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