ex-SnapNames empoyees start Market Mechanix to ride Google

February 12th, 2004
By Staff

A few ex-SnapNames employees Ron Wiener (former CEO), Len Bayles (former CTO), and Cameron Powell (former VP of business development) have joined forces with Charlie Kawasaki the former CEO of Portland's Rulespace. Their company has set out to ride the coat tails of Google by figuring out the Google search engine algorithm and inserting their pages in the engine.

The search engine industry insiders estimate that Google does 250 Million searches a day or around 8 billion searches a month. Market Mechanix is small but claims to have around 7 million page views a month. When asked how much they made they commented that it was enough to pay 7 full time employees and some outside contractors, also while repaying the founders' initial investment.

The secret to their success is injecting Google with their own pages produced by an engine they made. The engine makes pages for Google to crawl and when Google indexes them Google generally gives them a high placement. The key to placement is figuring out how Google scores pages and then custom crafting pages Google will like.

[img=http://img.nameintel.com/power-toys-experts.jpg]In a recent interview with the Oregonian, Mr. Kawasaki went on the record to say, "I still lie awake at night worrying about Google changing something." It is impossible for Market Mechanix to know if or when Google will just kick them out of the engine. The Google engineers are always changing the forumla and consider what Market Mechanix does to be a form of Spam. The industry term is SERP spam (SERP stands for Search Engine Result Page).

But assuming they have done their job correctly, Google will rank their site because it contains some editorial content and links to other websites in their web ring. One example of this is www.power-toys-expert.com, they have built a website that attracts buys of consumer electronics. Market Mechanix then shows links to retailers like GoodGuys.com and Tweeter.com. If the visitors buys something from the retailer then they give a kick back or referral credit to Mark Mechanix.

Market Mechanix has been operational since August 2003 and expects to keep expanding in with new ways in the future. Such as re-use of expired domain names or direct marketing.