By the end of 1998, what had begun with a permanently connected dial-up modem had snowballed into a two-megabit microwave radio link, covering millions of sites throughout the world.
-It was the beginning of the bubble," explained Bertolus. -In 1999 we managed to raise just under AU$8 million in seed funding, scaled up to large-scale IBM computers, and tried to compete internationally with a huge global database."
Reminiscing on a time when investors calculated a one-to-one ratio between sites to be searched and dollars invested, Bertolus said the company found flaws in the model just in time to jettison the global search engine and focus on the Australian market.
-Essentially in the early days, the reasoning was that a Web page was equal to a dollar in the search engine space, and if you had 50 million pages, as we did, that put you in the top 2 percent of all search engines," Bertolus explained. -The next challenge was to reach 100 million, and we got there as well."
As the technology raced towards the next benchmark of 250 million pages, concerns began to surface regarding the overall profitability of such business models. Rather than hurtling the company into technological oblivion, Bertolus applied the breaks and took a 180-degree turn back into the Australian marketplace.
And while the turnaround from a global reach to a local reach was dramatic, he said it enabled the company to focus on developing their IP in other directions.
-The same search engine technology we developed for the Web is now being used to interrogate ERP systems," Bertolus said. He pointed out that www.govsearch.com.au and www.edusearch.com.au rely on Web Wombat technology to search through .gov.au and .edu.au sites.
In fact, although the search engine continues to turn a profit, Web Wombat business development manager Peter Maniatis said the company now works across a range of different areas, including the search engine, portal services, and affiliate programs, as well as developing their IP into different areas.
-More recently we have been able to deliver search engine facilities across a corporate LAN and databases," Maniatis said. -It's like having Google over the office intranet."
Maniatis puts Web Wombat's initial success, and subsequent growth through a contracting market, down to the fact the IP for its products was all developed internally. Unlike many search engines, it was not caught out by buying into overvalued technology during the boom.
-The actual search engine is self-funding and pays for its operations in its own right," Maniatis said. -It is also used as a showcase for our technical ability, so it assists us in building a number of other revenue streams."
In fact, via the Web Wombat business model the humble search engine has diversified into a multi-faceted business model drawing revenues from hosted site searches, featured links, affiliate programs, and portal style offerings.
-What you see on the Web Wombat Web site is only part of what we do," Maniatis said. -In order to continue to grow in the robust way we would like, we need to ensure we keep the information unique, relevant and fresh. We are already a uniquely Australian portal, and we are planning to continue to deliver on that aspect of the business as well as innovate in other areas."
Where the Web Wombat model falls over is in not allowing the inclusion of Australian (and New Zealand) sites that use top level domains (TLDs). They are specifically demanding that the address has .au (or .nz) even though the site may clearly be an Australian site.
Web Wombat needs to rethink this, and allow the addition of sites with TLDs to their database (with manual intervention if required) if they are proved to be of Australian ownership.
Take a couple of Australian Museum sites (with an international scientific and amateur enthusiast user base) www.seaslugforum.net and www.crustacea.net. These contain a huge amount of great Australian content, yet remain unindexed by Web Wombat, it's a real shame and results in Web Wombat's relevance as the "Australian" search engine being diminished.
The .au/nz domain restriction is about the same as doing a reverse DNS lookup and only allowing sites physically hosted on this continent.
Even if you pay for a premium listing (which I did with www.webboy.net) it gets results on only particular search strings, yet the search engine still doesn't index the content into it's database.
It's a pity that they have limited their thinking on this. Mopre and more larce Australian companies (telstra.com) use TLD's nowadays.