Today we celebrate Columbus Day in the US.

Now what has All About Steak got to do with Columbus?

On a lighter note, both are about discovery.

Columbus set out to find something but really found something else. In fact, he found something WAY bigger than what he originally set out to find. The point he had no idea that there was something like America that existed on this planet – so in his imagination there was no way he could have mapped out a path to find America.

If he knew that America existed and he was looking for a path to find it, it would have been a SEARCH problem.

Since he didn’t know that America existed, he was really on a DISCOVERY path.

One of my portfolio companies Suggestica acquired an Isreali company called RawSugar that had an interesting technology in the search (rather discovery) space. With that acquisition, we started creating “vertical discovery engines” in a number of verticals (follow the Suggestica story in an article published in the latest issue of Business Development Outlook)

You can see an example of a discovery engine at http://www.allaboutsteak.com. This is a discovery engine for steak related content. In this case, as the content in the site increases, the power of the site increases. Please try searching for “recipes” and you will see about 1000 search results. On the left column, you will see choices to help you refine the search. You can pick one – let’s say “flank steak” and the search results are narrowed – now they are all related to “flank steak recipes”. The left column now dynamically changed to suggest more choices. You will see choices like “asparagus” and “pineapple juice” – this is the discovery part – you may not have known that there are recipes that have flank steak and asparagus. Search engines cannot do this (well) – only discovery engines can. We have file for three patents internationally in the “faceted search” space.

We at Suggestica believe that many a times people act like Columbus on the web. They are on an exploration and they love to discover new things. We want to provide them the tools to explore. We started with steaks and we plan to launch a few more verticals before the end of the year.

Have a great week ahead!

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PS: The PDF version of the Suggestica Story is here:
Suggestica Story  in BDO Magazine (PDF download)