Dogpile: Why Are There No Search Ads?

By Steven Finch on Friday, April 25, 2008

Filed Under: Analysis | Visited 482 times, 3 so far today

For a long time now there has been a search engine that has been totally forgotten about, that search engine is Dogpile. Dogpile is a meta-search engine that is currently owned by Infospace. I was browsing the site this afternoon and suddenly noticed that there werent any search ads in the results. Im so used to seeing search ads on Yahoo, Google, etc, but nothing on Dogpile. Why is this? Why would they have a search engine that is obviously not getting huge amounts of traffic, but is still getting something, so why not at the very least create a partnership with Google and get some money for those search ads?

This is probably not a good example, but im really sick of seeing Silicon Valley companies who get funding or whatever, but havent actually developed a real business model. Prime example lately was Sonific. Sonific was a great idea, but they never really had an affective business model that could go with their high class product. That is the main reason why I like seeing startups like Techmeme do so well, because they are bootstrapped with no money at all, but they have a real aim and a business model that can pull it all together.

Update: There was a misprint which stated that Dogpile was owned by IAC, which its not. Dogpile is owned by Infospace.

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6 Comments for this post

Correction…Dogpile is owned by Infospace Inc, which is based out of Bellevue, WA.

There are other ways of getting money from partnerships with Google, Yahoo, etc., such as “clicks”.

You are also assuming that Dogpile is not getting a lot of hits and does not have a good business model.

Do your research!

Posted onApril 26th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
Thanks for the comments. It would have been nice if you could have mentioned some specifics about Partnerships and traffic, etc.

Im not too sure if Dogpile does get a lot of hits. What percentage of the search market does the site have?

Posted onApril 26th, 2008 at 7:55 pm

I used to work for the company, so I can’t say specifically what the traffic is now. You can see the partnerships on the website, which is based on the search results, such as Google.

Posted onApril 26th, 2008 at 8:53 pm
I can see on the site that Dogpile has some nice partnerships Google, Yahoo, Ask, etc. But I was hoping you might be able to answer the question about business models.
Posted onApril 27th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
Daniel

If you look at the results in Dogpile you will notice a “sponsored by” in some of the results. These are ads. they’re just mixed in with the rest of the search result and not seperate like on other engines.

Posted onApril 27th, 2008 at 6:15 pm

[...] has been totally forgotten about, that search engine is Dogpile. dogpile is a meta-search engine …http://crenk.com/2008/04/25/dogpile-why-are-there-no-search-ads/Google Search - Google Esarch, Google Searchh Engine, Gogle Image Search, Ogogle People Search, [...]

Posted onMay 8th, 2008 at 2:14 pm

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