GenieKnows is a division of IT Interactive Services Inc., a privately owned vertical search engine company based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Like many internet search engines, its revenue model centers on an online advertising platform and B2B transactions. It focuses on a set of niche search markets, or verticals, including health search, video games search, and local business directory search[1].
GenieKnows uses algorithms to download, assess, and categorize web pages and index them for later matching with web search queries.
In 2005, GenieKnows entered the search engine market with a local business directory search engine[2]. Targeting only the United States in its beta release, the local search engine is similar to Google Maps but uses the proprietary GeoRank algorithm to associate potentially uncategorized web pages containing addresses with businesses listed in an internet Yellow Pages directory by extracting addresses and geocoding these to identify geographic coordinates for which it associates the web page[3].
On February 29 2008 GenieKnows Local was launched as a completely revised local search engine extending beyond the 100 most populous US cities covered in its beta release. The local search engine utilizes processed municipal business data, road network data, national park data, and geocoding technology to provide localized search results ranked according to a business's relevance to a user's web query. As of the February 2008 release, the engine covers over 90% of Canadian and US municipalities with populations above 1000 residents.
According to SEO and search marketing expert Jim Hedger, GenieKnows' strongest, most unique and important product is its local search engine.[4]
GenieKnows entered the vertical search market in 2006 with a vertical search engine for video games-related web pages and another for health-related web pages.
Web pages often describe or discuss a particular topic. In information retrieval and machine learning literature, classification algorithms have been used to automatically identify the subject matter of a web page. GenieKnows uses such algorithms as a focused crawler to download web pages, identify pages that are on topic with the vertical, and index and save those pages.
The result is a search engine that contains only web pages that are on a given topic, tailoring to a niche market of web users who have an interest in a given topic, so all pages returned for a query will be on topic with the vertical being used. For revenue generation, the engine displays advertisements beside the search results from a network of advertisers where it receives pay per click. GenieKnows is collaborating with Yahoo! to display targeted, contextualized advertisements to a targeted market of users.[5]
In February 2008, GenieKnows added online community functionality to its vertical search engine. Users sharing interest in a topic can communicate and contribute content to the site in a manner similar, but on a smaller scale, to those of Facebook, and Yahoo.
