Commentary
Slikk As A Browser-Based Search Engine
- by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, April 20, 2012
Picture someone leaning against a brick wall on the side of a fast-traveled highway. When Israeli-based Slikk CEO Feivi Arnstein described search as "a stagnant industry," the image became clear in my head. Search engines, if human, would passively watch technology zoom by. That's what motivated him to build a browser-based search engine.
Slikk allows users to click on links and open Web pages, rather than preview them. The engine, two years in the making, also enables users to open multiple views of a search query simultaneously, such as Images, News, Videos, and Blogs.
Tools allow users to toggle between open windows and scale the page to fit in the screen; and create links to Google, Yahoo, social sites -- or the user can create their own. The engine still runs into challenges, including not being able to open all Web pages such as Google+ in the browser.
Arnstein said that should change within a few weeks, giving searchers easy access to Google+ results, similar to those in Twitter or Facebook. Other changes are in the works as well.
Share any type of search results on Facebook or Twitter with ShareIt. Users also can add links to the navigation menu with MyLinks.
In query results, Slikk will serve up paid-search ads from Yahoo, which relies on an agreement with Microsoft adCenter. The ads will appear at the top of the page and the right side before the user opens a Web page from the search results. The revenue share model gives Slikk 75% of the profit from clicks, whereas Yahoo takes the remainder.
As traffic continues to rise, the browser-engine's percentage of revenue share continues to rise to about 95%, Arnstein said.
Slikk also signed an agreement with PriceGrabber, because Arnstein said the company will likely open a shopping stream service also. Think about the ability to see pages filled with merchandise that consumers can purchase from a Web browser.
The road map in the future also leads to developing bots that crawl and index the Internet rather than aggregate data from Google, Bing and other search engines, as well as social sites.
Interesting concept -- but gaining traffic will be the biggest challenge Slikk will face.
Laurie Sullivan is a writer and editor for MediaPost. You can reach Laurie at lauriesullivan@gmail.com.
I'm afraid I don't really understand the concept... Google's search also has a "preview" which is not unlike Slikk's. Ok, Slikk seems to have embedded a full browser-inside-the-browser while Google mostly uses a "snapshot". But the results for Slikk actually como from Google. So where exactly is the innovation in this?
It seemed quicker in replying than Google, though, but that is always hard to estimate...
Laurie, thanks for a great article. And I absolutely loved the "brick wall" analogy! I hope you don't mind if I use it in the future :-)
Gwyneth, while the "snapshot" feature and our feature seem to be similar superficially, they are actually day and night as far as efficiency is concerned. According to Google, people who use their snapshots " are about 5% more likely to be satisfied with the results they click".
With Slikk, that actually increases to 100%, because you know exactly what the result is showing you, and you don't have to open it in an external tab anymore.
But please don't take my word for it! Just try us out for a few days. The one thing our beta users have told us is that after using Slikk, going back to anything else is quite difficult...!