Mass High Tech - May 22, 2009

Startup, Ginio, aims to be top search site in Latin America
Mass High Tech

A local startup is aiming to take a swipe at Google Inc., but the entrepreneurs know they can’t take on the search giant on its home turf, so they are taking the fight to a friendlier venue — Latin America.

Ginio.com, a new search engine under development by Woburn-based Ginio Inc. and its founder Simon Vielma, will debut in the coming months as a Latin American-focused search engine, allowing users to easily find localized content in areas like San Pedro, Argentina, rather than San Pedro, Calif.

The idea is not without precedent. While domestic challengers of Google’s grip on search — Cuil, Halia, Mahalo and others — have failed to unseat the incumbent, companies based in other countries have found opportunities. Naver, for example, is the No.1 search engine in South Korea, averaging 130 million queries per day, according to company statements. Likewise, Baidu in China, Seznam in Czechoslovakia, and Yandex in Russia — all are the top search engines in their respective countries.

“In Latin America, Google is still strongest and the largest, but that’s because there isn’t a local alternative,” Vielma said.

Breaking into a new regional search market isn’t easy, said Habib Haddad, the co-founder of Yamli.com, an Arabic search engine founded in Cambridge. Simply putting up a Google-style home page in a different language is not enough.

“In emerging markets, shaping the expectations of users is very important, so there is opportunity to do things differently than a Google-style page,” he said this week as he traveled from Jordan to Beirut amid business meetings for Yamli. “I think there is room for new search engines in the emerging markets, but you really have to have a differentiation.”

Vielma, who previously founded international asset management firm Vielma Capital Partners, and his team have recognized that fact, and hope to differentiate Ginio by providing deeper searches in specific verticals of local content, such as mp3s, images and even retail products.

“It is very hard to build a search engine that can compete with Google on scale or relevance, but to search by vertical can be very useful to users,” he said, adding that it is something Google has not done particularly well in the past, citing the rise of Kayak.com in the travel vertical as an example.

Vielma, who is working on-site with a 13-person development team in China, said he hopes to launch Ginio’s first vertical, an audio and music search, within the month, and follow it with other areas later this year. The development has been funded by a group of friends and family investors up until now, but as the launch gets closer, Vielma said he will begin to seek a small amount of additional funding in the future.