iNods — yet another (!) Silicon Valley search engine

January 12, 2006 | Matt Marshall

“Niche” rules these days.

So iNods, based in San Jose, isn’t only a search engine. It is a shopping engine. And it isn’t only a shopping engine — it gets narrower than that. It searches blogs and other content related to pre-shopping, or research.

You can call this a Web 2.0 company, and so as usual, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington has the scoop:

Like the others, iNods has realized that there is a massive amount of review information out there in the blogosphere. And more is being created every day. They are harvesting that information, making it searchable…

Wait, isn’t this what Become.com has already been doing for a year now? They have a “research only” button. Here’s our first post on Become.com. Or are we missing something?

Maybe the point is that iNods is searching more blogs, and Become.com is instead ranking brand-name review publishers higher when returning results. But Become.com seems to be searching blogs already, so we will have to play a bit more with iNods to see how different this really is.

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About the Author, Matt Marshall

Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.