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Vurb Gives You a Contextual Search List And a Great Night Out

TMCnet Feature

May 06, 2014

Vurb Gives You a Contextual Search List And a Great Night Out

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By Joe Rizzo
TMCnet Contributing Writer

The way that we are used to searching for information today is to start off with a topic or title and then follow all of the links that regular search engines provide you with. Search engines are designed to provide answers for objective information such as sport scores or people or company listings, however at their core they are still a compilation of lists to external links.


Vurb’s mission statement claims that their goal is to intelligently organize and connect all the services together on the web. That means that when type in a search parameter you do not simply receive a list of links that you have to open separately in different tabs, instead Vurb’s goal is to dig the actionable information out of those links and present it all on the same page.

If you have a large enough monitor at home, opening several handfuls of tabs might not be too big a problem, but what if you are doing the same search on your mobile device? Will you have enough real estate to display say 15 tabs and switch back and forth between them? Chances are, the answer to that question is no.

The idea behind the startup company as they see it is to reinvent search results in the form of a web and mobile contextual search engine, so instead of having to do multiple searches in different tabs, Vurb collects all the relevant info on one page while still preserving your path in a savable, sharable stream.

Last year Vurb raised $1.5 million in funding. The startup seems to have a solid group of investors behind it. Supporting Vurb are companies and individuals such as Charles River Ventures, Max Levchin, Drew Houston, Naval Ravikant, Gil Elbaz, Jim Lanzone, Brad Garlinghouse, Adrian Aoun, Othman Laraki, Raymond Tonsing, CrunchFund and Atlas Venture. 

It seems that the best way that people have found to explain exactly how Vurb works is to go through an actual search. So who am I to try and find a harder way to go about it! The example used was to plan a night out with a movie and maybe something to eat. Actually, one of the reasons that this example was used is because with this initial launch Vurb is rolling out search for Places, Movies, and Media. The expectation is that People, Startup and additional verticals will appear soon.

You want to go out and start your evening with a movie so you link on Movies. The first thing that you will see is images presented in a grid form. This is basically a list displaying movies that are currently in the theaters. This can be filtered by category to narrow down your search.

Once you click on a movie title, you will get is what is being referred to as a card that will show you rating scores from IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes and you will notified if the movie is on Netflix. You will also be presented with a list of the stars, a short description, plus additional buttons to open Trailer, Showtimes, Cast, and Reviews.

Unlike conventional search engines, Vurb is designed to populate one useful screen with a line for each of the categories mentioned above. If you choose to view Showtimes, you will see a display of all the theaters that are near you plus show times. You will also have an option to buy tickets at the selected theater.

Once you have selected a location, you are then presented with a new grid. This is now the Places section of the search engine. You will see a photo of the theater, along with a Yelp review star average, Foursquare (News - Alert) check-in count, address, phone number, and hours.

If you scroll down to the bottom you will see buttons for Nearby Places, Directions and local Restaurants. If you decide to click on Nearby Places, you will be presented with a Pinteresque layout of stores and places to eat in the surrounding area, all of which you can filter.

You can continue to go deeper into planning your evening by checking out restaurants. If you click on one you will see a map to help you get there, a menu and you can also book a reservation from the same page. This entire process of planning a movie and catching a bite afterwards was all accomplished by scrolling down one page and clicking on the appropriate buttons.

Now you have your evening planned, so seeing as you are into the social media crazy, you want all your friends to know what you’ve done. That can also be a simple process with Vurb. If you want to share all of this wonderful information that you have found, you can save them as a collection and text it to your friends or even post it to Facebook (News - Alert).

One way of looking at this is that Vurb is simply ripping off other web properties, taking their data and delivering it to you in their own format. It seems that no one is actually denying that this is in fact the case however the plan is to actually split ad revenue with companies whose sites and apps provide the necessary data. The idea is that since the concept of the original search is with a purchase in mind, Vurb could simply ask for very high ad rates that are high enough to share with its partners.

Images via TechCrunch




Edited by Maurice Nagle


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