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Catching Up With Exponential Labs, The Startup Behind Long-Tail Search Site ‘MillionShort’

Colleen Taylor

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Colleen Taylor is based in San Francisco where she is a reporter for TechCrunch and TechCrunch TV. Previously she worked as a reporter for GigaOM, the Financial Times’ Mergermarket newswire, and the semiconductor industry newsletter Electronic News. Disclosure: Colleen holds a small amount of shares in AOL, which were awarded as part of her employment contract with TechCrunch. She personally... → Learn More

Thursday, November 8th, 2012
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Some people in the tech industry like to say that web search is a problem that has long been solved. But earlier this year, a small startup out of Toronto called Exponential Labs attracted some big attention with “MillionShort,” a clever hack called that let you bypass the top million (or 1000, or 10,000) Google search results to help surface long-tail content that has not yet risen to the top within traditional search engine algorithms.

MillionShort first appeared in May as a “Show HN” demo on Y Combinator’s news aggregator and discussion site Hacker News, where it quickly amassed hundreds of comments within the first day it was posted. At that time, we explained the site’s appeal like this:

“Say you’re looking for a new recipe for a dish you’ve made lots of times before. The top 20 search results are going to be from very popular food sites, of recipes you’ve probably already seen What if you want something fresh?

…It’s a lot like pruning a plant, or skimming the film off the top of a stew: MillionShort lets you remove the old or non-useful stuff from traditional web search to find new or interesting content.”

At first the team at Exponential Labs hadn’t intended for MillionShort to be its main focus, but in the months since May it has decided to pivot its full attention onto the search space — it has even developed its own search technology for a more standalone experience separate from Google. We caught up with Exponential Labs’ CEO Sanjay Arora at the TechCrunch Toronto meetup earlier this week to hear about the latest from the company. You can watch that in the video embedded above.


Crunchbase

Company: Million Short
Website: millionshort.com
Launch Date: April 30, 2012

Million Short is an experimental web search engine (really, more of a discovery engine) that allows you to REMOVE the top million (or top 100k, 10k, 1k, 100) sites from the results set. We thought might be somewhat interesting to see what we’d find if we just removed an entire slice of the web. The thinking was the same popular sites (we’re not saying popular equals irrelevant) show up again and again, Million Short makes it easy to discover...

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