You may have heard before: Google pays big money to people who send searchers their way. In the case of Mozilla, the search bar in the top right-hand corner of their webbrowser makes them something on the order of $40million a year. That’s a lot of money for searches. I don’t even want to know how much Apple makes off the Google search they have embedded in Safari.
Goovle, a Oakville, Ontario startup, is trying to take advantage of Google’s generous kickbacks with their custom search tool.
Groovle allows you to create a customized search page of your own, which most users would typically set as their homepage. Groovle’s unique feature is the huge library of images you can access to create your own page. You can also upload your own images.
The comments on their September review on Techcrunch predicted that Groovle would be shut down quickly. It is now the middle of November and they are still around. While I share some of the concerns of those commentors – it is not clear whether groovle actually has any rights to use these images – that doesn’t seem to be stopping them.
As of October 2007 they were clocking 250,000 visitors a month, but it is unclear how they have been doing since (compete.com is suggesting a 70%+ drop in traffic but I don’t trust compete all that much).
Groovle is a great example of a simple service with a potentially large audience that just takes a little elbow grease. All the components are there, Google is providing search and a kickback to sites who send searches their way, and there is (apparently) a wealth of art and images out there that you can make available to users.
Groovle is self funded by its founders, Ryan Fitzgibbon, Jacob Fuller and Nico Angka, and they are not currently seeking investment, but are perusing partnerships.
