Asterpix officially launched SearchLight Tuesday. For publishers, the real-time search tool offers a way to drive additional revenue. It keeps people on the site longer next to display and paid search
ads by suggesting similar search query topics related to an article or content that a visitor reads on the Web site. For site visitors, it provides additional resources to content they might not
otherwise explore.
The amount of information available on the Internet has grown so large that people have difficulty finding the content most relevant to them. Asterpix SearchLight aims to
help people discover relevant content, while increasing the publishers' share of search. Search engines get "a few percent" of all page views, but 50% of the investments, according to Asterpix.
Since the technology aims to keep people searching on the publisher's site, SearchLight can raise revenue for publishers on average between 15% and 20%, according to Asterpix CEO Nat Kausik. On a
typical site, about 40% of visitors leave the site to search on an engine such as Google, Bing and Yahoo, which could lead to a big loss in revenue, he says.
"The click rate on sites running our
technology is between 3% and 8%," Kausik says. That's up from a fraction of a percent when the company set out to develop the technology more than a year ago. "The real challenge became anticipating
what a consumer will search for next," he says.
And while the tool aims to broaden the perspective of both publisher and site visitor, Asterpix now appears to have the search power to offer so
much more. In fact, while SearchLight is not a stand-alone search engine, it does have the ability to search in real-time through an increasingly exhaustive amount of content across the Web, Kausik
says.
"It's the inverse of search, because search goes from keyword to URL, but this goes from URL to keyword," he says.
Twitter is one example where SearchLight would work well, according
to Kausik. "The number of tweets streaming from the site is so large that trying to find the information that matters isn't easy," he says. "We haven't approached Twitter, but it's possible."
A
crawler indexes on the fly. A publisher only needs to apply the snippet of code to Web pages. The first time each page is viewed, the crawler gets called. The page is added to the index. He explains
that within a week, the pages are added regularly to the index to create a steady impact on the information returned to the site visitor.
The technology relies on patent-pending PhraseMatch
technology to display contextually relevant search phrases next to publisher content, visually ranked by relevance and user-interest. Search phrases are linked to publisher-branded search pages hosted
by Asterpix, with search results restricted to publisher content.
Asterpix helps to power searches on a variety of sites, such as ConsumerAffairs.com, and Docstoc.com, which Kausik calls "a
YouTube for documents."