“eriQoo.com is a search engine, but we take a very different approach than that of Google and other search engines,” said Tsai, CEO of eriQoo.com . “What we do is identify which are the best products or services. If a person is looking for eye doctors, he can go to a regular search engine and type in ‘eye doctors’ and that search engine will give him probably 35 million search results. Those results will just direct him to sites where information on eye doctors may be found. But I think that people are looking for the best eye doctor in their town and that’s what eriQoo.com does. In response to your query on eye doctors, it will list the top ten eye doctors in your town.”
eriQoo.com is a search engine that focuses on service and product comparisons, enabling people to evaluate things, especially before making a purchase. eriQoo.com indexes the data available online and then allows the information to be ranked, sorted and filtered depending on the question the user asks or the parameters of the user’s query.
“If you were to look for the best laptop on eriQoo.com, you could put in up to five parameters,” explained Tsai. “You could specify that you wanted the laptop to light, thin, have very long battery life, high resolution and a powerful CPU. Then our search engine would give you a list of laptops that were best according to your requirements, rather than focusing on any individual criteria.”
The technology behind eriQoo.com is based on artificial intelligence and complex indexing algorithms which allow computers to handle human language competently. While it’s obvious that computers understand programming languages, eriQoo.com technologies give a computer the ability to understand natural language. For instance, if a person asks what is the strongest company in terms of sales, or the largest company by revenue or the biggest company by turnover, this is actually the same question asked in three different ways and there is just one answer. Human beings would understand this but a computer wouldn’t. That’s why there are such problems with search engine results. Tsai claims that eriQoo.com’s technology enables computers to read the question instead of trying to match key words. This is very different from the functionality of traditional search engines.
The answers provided by eriQoo.com are based as much as possible on hard facts. Sometimes though, facts aren’t enough and the majority opinion must be considered to give a valid answer.
“Which is the fastest car or the lightest handset? We can answer such questions using facts,” Tsai said. “Often, facts and majority opinion must be combined, such as which is the best airline or the top university. We use Internet spiders that crawl through social media to find majority opinion. We have an algorithm that considers the authenticity of the postings and balances the time frame of various postings in relationship to the information sought in the query.”
Search using eriQoo.com is available now in Japanese and Chinese. The company will offer English and Spanish in 2011, with Arabic to follow. The layout of the site will differ in appearance and functionality depending on the language. Japanese and Chinese are time consuming to enter with a keyboard, so users in these languages prefer point and click mouse functionality rather than typing in queries with a keyboard.
Currently, eriQoo.com has 54 staff members worldwide with offices in Tokyo, Beijing and the USA. It’s a young team, with most eriQoo.com engineers in their 30s. The company is already licensing certain of its technology modules and Tsai is confident that such licensing will grow. He also believes that advertising will increase as brands come to understand the value eriQoo.com brings. eriQoo.com measures how users behave when searching for products and services and these results can help advertisers better target their marketing messages.
“We have a competitive advantage because of our technology. There’s nothing else like it,” claimed Tsai. “Many of our engineers are one of a kind, with unmatched skill sets and talents. Unless they depart our company for another, it wouldn’t be easy for others to develop the technology we already own, are constantly improving and are using to grow eriQoo.com.”
