Last Thursday was one of those good news/bad news days for the creators of the Electric Monk, the new search tool that allows netsurfers to enter search queries as questions in conversational English. (Instead of punching in a list of keywords, like "cookies chocolate chip recipe," you ask the Monk, "Where can I find a good recipe for chocolate-chip cookies?")
After three months of moderate hit counts and little publicity, an article in Wired News brought in a tsunami of search queries and a surge of email, much of it praising the simplicity of using the service. That was the good news.
The bad news began with a phone call from one of the folks at the Digital Equipment Corporation, the owners of AltaVista. The Electric Monk was using AltaVista as its backend to run searches on the Web, parsing questions into expert Boolean queries that were then submitted to AltaVista.
The problem? Electric Knowledge, the three-person startup that put the Monk online, had never negotiated a business relationship with Digital.
Electric Knowledge CEO Edwin Cooper and another partner, Charles Frankel, are just out of grad school, and the president of the company, Bryan Sivak, is a recent college graduate. They had never made any money on the Monk, investing US$15,000 of their own capital to develop an application that seemed promising.
On 1 December 1997, Sivak sent an email to Digital's chief technology officer, Louis Monier, inviting a discussion of "how the Electric Monk could be added to AltaVista's complement of technologies." The email did not call attention to the fact that the Monk hitchhiked on AltaVista's database. Sivak never received an answer.
When the call came in from Digital after the article appeared, Sivak recalls, the caller "asked us what kind of market we were planning on getting into, and if we were running any ads. We told him we didn't have any ads, and that we weren't trying to compete with AltaVista. He said, 'I don't see much of problem then.' It was very friendly."
Later that day, however, Sivak noticed that the Monk wasn't returning any search results. Sivak had an intuition that AltaVista might be blocking traffic from the Monk's Net address, and ran a mirror of the Monk code on his local server to check. It worked fine.
Sivak put up a notice at electricmonk.com explaining that AltaVista was "currently blocking all requests from our site." Sivak called the person at Digital who he had spoken to earlier, and was told the decision to cut off the Monk was made by "higher-ups." When Sivak asked to speak to those who had made the decision, he was told that "the discussion is over."
The next day, Cooper got a call from someone at Digital saying that even the page mentioning AltaVista would have to be taken down.
"They told us we couldn't talk about AltaVista on our site at all," Cooper says.
Missing links
Then things took an even stranger turn. The day before the article appeared, when Cooper ran an AltaVista advanced search for links to the Electric Monk, 47 results came back -- sites like the Maple River Middle School hotlist and the mammoth Agents Abroad index.
Today, there are none. What happened?
Kathy Greenler, director of marketing for AltaVista, claims that the sudden absence of links to the Monk is caused by "coincidence."
"We add and delete pages all the time to keep our index current," she says. "If they want to resubmit their pages, they can."
As to the ongoing legal face-off between AltaVista and the Electric Monk, Greenler would say only that "Our lawyers are talking to them to come up with a solution."
Sivak and Cooper are contrite about their failure to negotiate a relationship with Digital, but they point out that if the pages linking to the Monk were, in fact, removed by Digital staff intentionally, it raises questions about the selectivity of the scope of the Web that AltaVista presents. Are links to other potentially competing search sites being systematically excluded?
Taming the World-Wild Web
The Electric Monk is a meta-search tool, reformatting queries to another search utility in an effort to achieve more effective searches. One of the most popular meta-search engines, go2net's MetaCrawler, was also launched with no formal relationships worked out with the sites it was using as databases, back in 1995. Like the Monk, the MetaCrawler began as an academic experiment in information retrieval that showed commercial potential.
When go2net acquired the MetaCrawler in January 1997, go2net negotiated relationships with each of the search sites from which MetaCrawler siphons results, including Lycos, Infoseek, WebCrawler, Excite, AltaVista, and Yahoo.
"Philosophically, we took the approach that we shouldn't be getting something at their expense," says go2net CEO Russell Horowitz.
When MetaCrawler serves up a page that incorporates Yahoo's results, for instance, it will pull an ad from Yahoo's servers -- allowing Yahoo to track and take credit for ad displays and click-throughs.
Horowitz says that when go2net contacted the various search services to map out agreements, he was told that none of the other meta-search sites had done so. "That allowed us to build a tremendous amount of goodwill."
Daniel Dreilinger, architect of one of the pioneering meta-search utilities, SavvySearch, believes that meta-searching that employs increasingly specialized niche databases -- such as health, travel, entertainment, and recipe databases -- is "the way of the future."
"Meta-searches bring more traffic to the original site," he says. With the proper agreements in place, Dreilinger says, "it can be a mutually beneficial relationship."
Reflecting on the blow-up with Digital, Cooper says that his view is that "it's a culture clash. The three of us are used to the Web being the Wild West, where a publicly available service is accessible to anyone, and oral agreements are OK."
The code that made the Monk so easy to use could be employed with many other search utilities, Cooper says. Electric Knowledge is currently trying to work out a relationship with a number of other services, including Lycos and Inktomi.
"We're open to a reasonable agreement. We always have been," Cooper offers. "We don't want to go to war."
