August 30, 2010
It's amazing, but I've found a great answer for desires of Paul Graham, the legendary founder of Y Combinator! His call for startups "Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund" includes at least two wishes, for which my Mini-WWW is a real solution:
"2. Simplified browsing.
There are a lot of cases where you'd trade some of the power of a web browser for greater simplicity. Grandparents and small children don't want the full web ..."
"16. A form of search that depends on design. Google doesn't have a lot of weaknesses. One of the biggest is that they have no sense of design. They do the next best thing, which is to keep things sparse. But if there were a kind of search that depended a lot on design, a startup might actually be able to beat Google at search. I don't know if there is, but if you do, we'd love to hear from you."
Well, I'd love to tell you, Mr. Graham, that ranking within my search engine Mini-WWW.com depends exclusively on quality of design for referenced webpages. Namely, their SIMPLICITY! And that greately simplifies the browsing experience!
You are right, there are many people, - and I suspect they are majority of Internet users!, - who do not need the full Web. They come to websites to quickly find the answers they wanted, -not to stare to a beauty of the complex html design, script, or Flash advertising.
So, my Mini-WWW is based on a sound idea. This is a huge niche that is completely ignored by major search engines' leaders, including the Google. I think it's mostly because of the prevailing belief that cheapness of automatical indexing is better than quality of manual reviewing. While I feel a small startup may perfectly suit for doing this kind of business.
Another small surprize for me was that I found a partial confirmation to that thought in ... Y Combinator's comments (Re. simplified browsing):
"... it's hard to be a big new success in Web 2.0. Tons of smart people are avid Internet users, and they're interested in that. Unless you're towards the apex of that group, coming up with a market-shaking new Web 2.0 idea will be tough.
This is also the reason I left quant finance- given how many smart people were competing with me, I could much more easily invent something useful for other people (which feels better and is less stressful), and make a fortune that way."
I also must say I love Paul Graham's website. I love to read his essays. I really do! I read them many times. They are perfect, - clear, wise, and up to the point.
Obviously, I would greately benefit from discussing my ideas with Paul and people in his famous eco system. Especially taking into account I desperately need money (I launched my Mini-WWW.com with ZERO funding).
Unfortunately, his Y Combinator is for Americans only.
Meaning that to get the US visa from poor Ukraine, one must be as rich as average American is, - and that is simply not possible for most Ukrainians.