marin_smiljanic
marin_smiljanic OP t1_j6nrw4y wrote
Reply to comment by The_Patriot in I'm Marin Smiljanic, founder and CEO of Omnisearch, a venture-backed startup building the next generation of search technology. AMA by marin_smiljanic
I think ChatGPT will be an essential part of search experiences, but I don't think it'll kill current search products. There's still a lot of value in being able to point to original sources.
marin_smiljanic OP t1_j6ngwf6 wrote
Reply to comment by SylviaJacob in I'm Marin Smiljanic, founder and CEO of Omnisearch, a venture-backed startup building the next generation of search technology. AMA by marin_smiljanic
I'm assuming you mean '20s. I believe that there will be two main factors in the evolution of search.
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A far bigger focus on multimodal, rather than just text search. The old-school search companies were built in a text-first world. But text is pretty rapidly declining in importance. And while still an essential part, it's no longer enough. I think you'll see more and more companies focusing on multimedia content like video, audio and images.
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I'd say that rather than having one huge new competitor to Google, you'll rather have large platforms that each cover a specific area of search. Reddit, Instagram, TikTok and Amazon are good examples of that, and I think the trend will continue.
marin_smiljanic OP t1_j6nbd4p wrote
Reply to comment by chrismatters in I'm Marin Smiljanic, founder and CEO of Omnisearch, a venture-backed startup building the next generation of search technology. AMA by marin_smiljanic
We tried a ton of different things, except that we didn't do too much advertising. We have pretty strong content marketing (constantly publishing blog posts and posting on social media), lead magnets such as e-books, posting on Reddit, HN and Product Hunt (we were the Product of the day in October).
PR actually achieved pretty good results too. A bunch of cool prospects reached out to us after the press covered our round.
marin_smiljanic OP t1_j6nb01a wrote
Reply to comment by [deleted] in I'm Marin Smiljanic, founder and CEO of Omnisearch, a venture-backed startup building the next generation of search technology. AMA by marin_smiljanic
It was pretty intuitive really. When I was working at Amazon, we had an internal system for training videos. As I was always on teams with fairly complex technical products (S3 and Alexa), the videos would always be pretty long and packed with dense technical content.
So whenever I wanted to look any information up inside these videos, there was no way to do it - you could search by title, description or other such metadata, but searching the content and navigating to the exact spot where something was covered was impossible.
This was the spark that led to the product.
marin_smiljanic OP t1_j6nt40t wrote
Reply to comment by SylviaJacob in I'm Marin Smiljanic, founder and CEO of Omnisearch, a venture-backed startup building the next generation of search technology. AMA by marin_smiljanic
Currently what you'd call enterprise or B2B search is estimated at about $10B annually, but I believe that'll increase significantly once more customers start discovering the value of multimodal search experiences.
We currently expose an API which customers can use for integration. We can definitely make the integration process smoother by providing out of the box ingestion options (Google Drive, S3, and such, which is planned for this quarter) and also by developing SDKs.