If you can’t find what you are looking for, ask a friend — that’s the simple idea two former AOL (NYSE: TWX) execs hope will resonate with web users as they launch AskPeopleYouKnow.com (APYK), a “social search engine” that combines crawler-based search algorithms with answers from a personlised, extended network of friends.
The privately funded site, which counts Endemol creative director-turned-serial-investor Peter Bazalgette among its equity backers, launched in limited beta on Thursday after a year of private testing. But the site can hardly have picked a tougher market to launch in: Google (NSDQ: GOOG) attracted 83.8 percent of all UK searches in June according to Nielsen, with on Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) 5.4 percent and with Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) 3.2 percent, which leaves a very small sliver of market share for everyone else, no matter how innovative the business model…
Co-founder David Gilbey, who started the project with Mike Clowes, told paidContent:UK the business model was based around the specific recommendations the site can generate: “The most logical way to monetise it is to connect (users) with companies and brands.. We’re trying to give a much more targeted, relevant set of results than you would get with normal search. That’s very attractive to advertisers.” And in reality that means targeted display ads and, eventually, paid search listings…
— Click here to answer a question: Like social networking sites, APYK encourages users to build up a network of friends and family who can then answer each others’ queries; user-generated answers appear alongside traditional web search results (and ads). “We spent a year trying to make the sign-up process as intuitive and simple as possible,” says Gilbey, who adds that in testing many users invited specific people to join to answer specific questions which — the site hopes — gives its growth a viral quality.
— Local partnerships As with all search engines, APYK isn’t just about its own site: Gilbey is in talks with “big commercial organisations” about search partnerships, plus there are advanced talks with local community-based groups’ websites to tap into their ready-made communities: “We’re already talking to lots of small, pre-existing groups like football clubs, residents’ associations… Where groups exist for a purpose, then this is a way to offer them more utility.” And in theory it offers advertisers a set of highly-targeted, narrow-interest demographics.
— Two-year profitability target: “We’ve got very supportive investors and we’ve agreed straightforward goals on when we would break even…if we could do that within 18 months to two years then that would be a reasonable length of time for an early stage business.” The company has eight full-time staff and several part-time advisors, so it’s cost base is relatively low. But the site’s growth will be slow, at least at first: having just created an account, I realised I have no APYK friends to answer my questions…

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