http://mamma.com/info/about.html

http://www.googleguide.com/google_works.html

On March 8^th, Mamma.com’s stock soared 27% after it reported earnings of $420,175 on revenues of $3.6 million. This is paltry compared to industry leader Google’s earnings of $997.3 million on over $3 billion in revenues. However, any profitability reported by an internet company is a good sign as most tech companies have a hard time turning a profit. The appeal of Mamma.com’s search engine, or the is its self-touted “smart” metasearch engine. In essence, a query to its search engine is similar to searching multiple search engines and will display the best results from all the search engines.

Google’s search engine works much like what was described in class. First, the internet is “crawled” by Googlebots, and updated as needed. The results are then stored in Google’s index database. Last, when the user enters a query, the query processor searches the index and returns what it thinks are the best pages according to its ranking system. The system used by Google is not public information, but again it seems similar to what was discussed in class. The ranks or the level of relevance to the query topic depends on factors like how many links there are to a web page from other pages, and the quality of these linking pages. In all likelihood, this process is iterated to give the best results.

Instead of taking Google’s method of physically building up an index database by crawling the web, Mamma.com’s metasearch engine piggybacks on the likes of Google and Yahoo search engines. In essence, each time a user send a query to Mamma.com, the metasearch engine sends out queries to multiple search engines and content sites and returns the results after ranking them by relevance. According to Mamma.com, one of the chief ways that it sorts result is by using the duplicate results (from different engines). The more times a page turns up in different search engines, the higher its rank is. This sort of search engine has become very popular, and its results are good as well. The main problem of course is that metasearch engines relies on other search engines for its results. Without companies like Google and Yahoo, websites like Mamma.com would not exist.  For now though, Mamma.com has a bright future ahead.