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January 18, 2000
Child-Proof Search Engine Sold to U.S. Company
By Alicia Camphuisen
The world's first child-proof
Internet search engine, SearchHound, was sold to US
e-commerce company TVIShop.com for
AUS$6 million (US$3.96 million).
SearchHound's developer, Adelaide-based WebGenie Software, has also retained
intellectual property rights to the technology as part of the sale.
WebGenie's chief executive officer Siva Prasad said that the sale
would enable the company to continue its core focus of developing
e-commerce products. He added that further business involving SearchHound
would remain an option.
"An independent assessment conservatively valued SearchHound at AUS$16.5
million (US$10.9 million), but we decided to sell at a lower price in
return for retaining the intellectual property rights," Prasad said.
The search engine, which was launched 18 months ago, was developed by
WebGenie in a joint venture with Los Angeles-based Aesop Marketing Corp., which handled
international marketing of the product.
SearchHound posts a warning before revealing the results of a search for
adult-related terms, and users can block the display completely through
password access.
Search engine developers select the pages for inclusion in its database
and index them based on relevant keywords. The system also allows access to
24 other search engines.
Sites that are featured in SearchHound can 'bid' for URLs, so that their
properties are given priorities in search results.
Australian Internet company iseek
produced a search engine last November that similarly filtered out search
results on sites that contained content relating to pornography, violence,
drugs and discrimination. This filter could also be adjusted by password
access, and was available for free download from iseek's Web site (see
report, November
17, 1999).
According to Prasad, SearchHound has been receiving more than four
million page impressions a month.
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