Nstein: Another Search Engine Upstart

I came across a little company called Nstein Technologies recently. Their one year technical chart looks very promising, so I bought a few shares.

They've developed a search engine that employs semantic analysis software. For example, if someone wants to do a search such as "What investments have American companies made in European companies over the last three years?". the Nstein search engine can find very relevant results.

You can imagine what kind of irrelevant results would come up if you typed this into Google or Yahoo or MSN Search. These engines "would generate countless hits only based on keyword matching and requiring a great deal of time and effort to sift through."

Nstein has been working with IBM recently to help release the OmniFind Yahoo! Edition search engine. Their other blue chip clients include Time Magazine and the BBC.

This seems like a small gem of a company that could be bought out soon by one of the big search engines or maybe even more likely, one of the big traditional media companies.

Why would big media be interested in Nstein? Here's a clue from an interesting interview from earlier this week with their VP;

Mario Girard., the president and CEO of text-mining maverick Nstein Technologies Inc., predicts newspapers will survive in the future, but will be entirely custom-printed.

To accomplish this, the media will need a special tool to organize and index their content quickly so they can be sent to the right subscribers and offer more relevant ads.

This is where Nstein's semantic analysis software comes in. It reads through tonnes of data and creates a neat summary of it: what it's about, how important it is, and what's related to it.

"Nstein is the closest technology to the human brain when it comes to understanding text," Girard said.

Of course, since I now own a few shares, I'd love to see a bidding war take place soon. Their market cap is only at about $20 million now and sales are about $10 million a year. See the most recent news about Nstein Technologies and their stock chart here.

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.