#Winning on the Web
We started Infochimps because finding data on the web is hard. The pain of “find” is not unique to data: there is a lot of stuff on the web which makes finding what you’re looking for hard. Quora estimates Google has as many as 100 billion web pages indexed. That’s a pretty big hay stack. A lot of time is spent finding needles.
The flip side of this, is that its really hard to find customers on the web. In order to be found, a site needs to rank highly on the first page of a Google search result, or be so ubiquitous that people type it directly into their URL bar. A lot of money is spent finding customers.
The winners on the web are sites that can bridge this gap: that help customers find what they are looking for, and help sellers find those customers. These sites are commonly called marketplaces. Infochimps is a marketplace.
If it were easy to build a marketplace, everyone would do it. It isn’t. The best post I’ve seen on marketplaces is this one. Good luck finding it on Google.
Meta search engines like DuckDuckGo let you search myriad sites through a single search box, though you need to learn a lot of shortcuts (!data for Infochimps). Google might support choice, but they have a strong preference that you start your search there. The Google killer isn’t going to be a search engine in the traditional sense, but a marketplace of marketplaces.
