By Eliza Ridgeway
 JOE HU/TOWN CRIER Dan Kikinis and Gene Feroglia are the co-founders of Los Altos startup Otopy, which bids to improve Internet searches. |
Los Altos-based startup Otopy wants to change the way people search the Internet.
The Otopy product, now released in beta, is a free Internet browser plug-in that superpowers every search. It uses linguistic algorithms to automatically derive and try alternative keywords on a range of search engines and presents its results in a compact format.
“The idea is that it’s the first step to finding everything,” Los Altos resident Gene Feroglia said.
He and Dan Kikinis founded Otopy in 2003. This week they announced a new version of the plug-in specially made for eBay users for focused searches of the shopping database.
eBay users searching for a perfect holiday gift can enter a word into the Otopy assistant, which will search eBay’s database for that word and a bevy of other related phrases generated by the Otopy database. The search assistant’s strength lies in its ability to anticipate keywords and synonyms that a user might not enter.
“We have a relationship between terms that is very dynamic and adapts itself to the way terms change. It happens automatically; it’s not as if we have a thousand linguists in a closet somewhere,” Kikinis said.
He said Otopy’s optimized database has a millisecond response time, faster than the Internet delay.
Feroglia said that Otopy has the ability to grow, encompassing specialized databases like eBay’s - corporate, legal, or medical. They have also designed a novel user interface. Search results display with a mouse rollover, which allows users to preview the different findings rather than opening each result individually.
“A complete search is done in two or three clicks,” Kikinis said.
This style of interface particularly benefits mobile devices like cell phones and PDAs, on which searching can be a more awkward process.
The startup earns revenue by selling ad space beneath search results. Otopy is currently released only for Internet Explorer, but Kikinis said they plan to support other browsers soon.
For more information, visit www.otopy.com.
