DeepDyve, a search engine based out of Menlo Park, has just raised $3.9 million from 25 private investors. I think this is another startup that I would pass on investing in. Here’s why:
1) Uh, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo. 3 huge players that all invest tons of money in search. All have the top minds in the world and one of them (achem, Google) makes all of their money from search, so I highly doubt they will risk being out-spent in search.
2) The founders have no experience in search, though they do have experience in bioinformatics. These are biologists, not hardcore computer scientists and search is a highly complicated, highly expensive field.
3) It seems DeepDyve’s value-add is that they index scholarly journals that the other guys typically miss…because it would be very difficult for Google to do the same. Uh, no.
4) Didn’t Cuil already do this? And failed…not because they didn’t do their part and index more of the web, but because nobody cared. Search has become a marketing issue as well and Google’s brand can’t be paralleled. It’s a freakin’ verb that we use every day. It’s embeded in every popular browser.
5) How will they make money? Yahoo can’t even do this well anymore. They are gonna have to be creative in order to generate any revenue.
All this said, I wish them luck. Better search is better for everyone and competition certainly keeps the big guys on their toes.
