Matthew Koll, chairman and founder of Wondir, discusses his company’s “live question-and-answer” approach to online search in a MediaPost interview with marketing consultant Max Kalehoff.
We’d like people to think of Wondir as the service to use when you wonder, “Is there anyone out there that can help me with this question?”
What we’re trying to do is unite the world into a very fast question-and-answer capability. Our vision is that if we had millions of people connected by the various communications mechanisms we use, when a question comes into your head, there might be a person in the world who can help you. The idea of people interacting and exchanging knowledge has not benefited from the speed enhancements that searching has. But if you can take that dynamic and make it behave like search, then you can achieve the benefits of search: ease-of-use, immediate results, and a proven business model. We’re bridging the gap between search engines and the sort of slower community interaction that existed in the past.
Regarding the Wondir user experience:
You ask a question, and while looking at immediate results, someone may IM you with a live, new response. We capture the answers and build up a knowledge base that way. Over time, more and more people can be served by seeing the answers that other people got to similar questions. There are over 100,000 different people who have answered questions on Wondir, and about 40 percent of questions get a fresh response from another member within 10 minutes. We’re closing in on 2 million questions and answers, each.
We continue to get more answers than questions every day — the ratio is nine to seven…As the community grows we should see greater breadth, depth, and quality in the answers. More people connected should also mean even faster responses.
Kalehoff says that, after a few years in beta mode, Wondir “recently launched its service commercially as a destination as well as a licensable platform for other publishers.” He adds that the company’s market share of U.S. Internet visits in June was up 400% compared to year-ago levels.
Noting that the major search players are enhancing their services with “community-based sharing, tagging, personalization, and new algorithms” Kalehoff suggests that:
When relevance and results become more individualized and influenced by people, the protocol for marketing brands in the realm of search will change. The intersection of search, social networks, and user-generated content appears to be growing.
Mitch Shapiro at 12:23 PM|Comments(0)
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