Start-up web firm goes in search of new markets

Peter Wren-Hilton

The world of internet search may be dominated by Google and other multinational giants but a tiny search engine technology company headquartered in the Bay of Plenty is in global expansion mode.

Tauranga-based start-up Pingar this month announced it had opened a research and development office in Swansea, Wales, adding to its sales and marketing office in London and a research presence in Bangalore.

Pingar's point of difference is it serves up search results as PDF or XPS documents rather than as a series of links on a web browser page.

"Rather than just providing you with a link to [relevant online documents or content] we go inside the document, find the content relating to the query, aggregate that content, extract it, and paste it into a dynamic PDF document which is created on the fly," says Pingar managing director Peter Wren-Hilton.

"So rather than asking users to browse, we've effectively taken the browsing out of browsing."

Despite strong competition in the search space and the global recession putting the squeeze on online advertising, Tauranga-based Wren-Hilton, who co-founded Pingar three years ago, says he is optimistic about the company's future.

Turning that optimism into a profitable business will involve selling a marketing concept to online advertising agencies: a model whereby the agencies bid for the right to insert company logos and ads into search result documents for certain "profiles" of Pingar users.

The company is also promoting its software as a means of boosting worker productivity when it is integrated with collaboration tools such as Microsoft's SharePoint.

"People can get information in a readable format much more quickly than they can using current search tools across their SharePoint or other enterprise platforms," says Wren-Hilton.

"We think with a lot of companies' focus now being on costs and improving productivity that the launch of Pingar in some ways could not have come at a better time."

Pingar also needs to get content generators such as media organisations and academic institutions signed up for the service.

Wren-Hilton says that process will be helped by the company's ability to offer payment for reusing their material, whereas search engines like Google have been "scraping" publicly available material and serving it up with little return to its creators.

"There's no cost to the online content owners. We simply pay them a cheque or an online payment at the end of each month. And it reflects exactly how much content they've served to our reports."

Pingar has been smart about tapping into the resources offered up by economic development agencies keen to foster high-tech businesses.

It works closely with Trade & Enterprise and used a grant from the Foundation of Research Science & Technology to fund work developing algorithms carried out by WaikatoLink, the commercial arm of Waikato University.

The expansion into Swansea has been helped by Welsh development agency International Business Wales.

"The reason we're setting up a separate entity in Swansea is really to support the work WaikatoLink is doing.

"A number of the technology partners we're working with are based in the UK, and therefore in terms of time zones it's easier for face-to-face meetings with those partners if we have a UK presence," Wren-Hilton says.

It has the backing of a number of wealthy New Zealand people, who want to remain anonymous.

ALL THE ANSWERS

* Founded in 2006.
* Now has a presence in Tauranga, Bangalore, London and Swansea.
* Has developed a "next generation publishing, advertising and aggregation platform" for generating search result report documents.
* This "dynamic publishing" platform is targeted at content owners wanting to make money from their content and advertisers looking for targeted audiences.
* Rather than searching for documents that contain all the keywords in a question and listing them, Pingar finds the documents that contain the answers, abstracts the relevant content from each document and then creates a new single document containing the answer. Targeted advertising can be added to the document.