While you were celebrating the new year yesterday I was here on my laptop, online, working on Assista.
The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge
- Berle, Adolf
The purpose of Assista is to give the user an unfair advantage on education, learning. It is a different kind of Search - an Inquisitive Search.
Our first year is not focused on making money. We do have a number of ideas how to monetize Assista however at the moment it just isn’t a priority. Our Job #1 is to build an amazing experience for our visitors.
Traffic as we all know is essential, it is the fuel for your site. What makes a great business is the combination of your business model, traffic quality, and traffic volume. Since we do not have a business model yet, we are facing a more difficult problem then others. To sovle the traffic issue we are going in multiple directions. They are:
1. Redirecting a couple of generic domains from our portfolio: That will result in around 300K unique visits a month.
2. Buying traffic from the search engines: Not a cheap proposition, plan to get around 200K-300K in first month and then adjust as needed.
Also in our plan during the first six months is to take a closer look at SEO, as we believe we can get hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of visits from various search engines.
A while ago I wrote about an article called “Death of Domain Names“. In it, the author wrote:
Alongside this message to “˜widgetize everything’ I’ve been telling anyone who will listen that we soon won’t have big static websites (however good you think you’ve got at updating and nurturing your site, you know that really 90% of it is dead in the water), we will have distributed websites that live in a thousand or a million places around the web - and in no place. The idea here is that as your content is broken up and thown out into the four corners of the web, that is where you come to reside. You no longer have a central address, you only exist where you end up. If you are good, you end up in some very powerful places. If you are bad - well, we all know what happens on the web if you are bad.
While I don’t think this will be the end of domain names I do think it is a valid point. At the moment we plan to look closely at unique visits to the Assista homepage however, as time goes by, I predict the main measurement we will be looking at is expansion of questions (when a user clicks a question). The main difference is we can monetize each expansion whether the user lands on our homepage or using Assista through some sort of syndication, widget.
Within 18 months we plan to be one of the top 10 search destinations online. Within three years one of the top five. From where I sit, what I see, this will require allot of work, allot of thinking, dedication, however it is far from the impossible.
How can you help? Blog/write about your Assista experience/thoughts, tell your friends, family, associates about Assista. More than anything we’re highly interested in constructive feedback. I worry too much when everyone is positive about what I do. Either I’m a genius (highly unlikely) or they don’t tell me the truth! 
Looking forward to this new learning experience, conquering yet another mountain.
Cheers
Sahar
I have been tooling around with Assista and want to offer 2 small but none than less helpful thoughts I had.
1. It would be helpful if you had a spell check like google’s search feature.
It helps people like me who are gifted in technology but poor in spelling. Can’t get all the good genes from your parents. ï?Š
For example I typed in “personaliyt traits”? with the YT misplaced and it sort of came up with some correct answers but not what I expected.
It came up with: No results found for exact match “personaliyt traits”. Displaying partial match.
It would be helpful if it gave you a choice to correct it.
2. I noticed, when the Assista Processing Query logo comes up, it’s in an odd place. It might look better centralized on the line or left justified.
Happy New Year!
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Thanks Matt for the feedback. As for spell checker we had it before the release and I do agree it’s essential. We will add it later for sure.
As for logo, will pass it along for consideration.
Thanks!
Sahar
It’s not advisable to use a 302 on the root of the website. Sure it will list assista.com in de serps instead of ../Index, but you will lose a lot of strength with the redirect.
Best to display the content directly at assista.com
Best of luck with assista in this new year !
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Thanks Arturo, will pass it along.
Cheers
Sahar
Happy New Year, Sahar!
I know you are super excited about Assista, and your readers like me are very interested in folloiwng (and participating) in it’s evolution. We look foward to continued postings on it. However, I would recommend you continuine blogging on non-Assista things like you have in the past. One of the things I like about your blog and others like SevenMile is the great sharing of ideas, advice and links to other articles of interest. That’s what keeps me coming back.
Best wishes for an awsome 2008!
RM
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You’re absolutely right about my excitement, I’ve been waiting over three years for it to go live.
I will blog about other things as well, other businesses, other concepts, experiences, lessons, etc., however, my blog was never meant to be a “domain only blog” and that I will leave for others to concentrate on.
Cheers
Sahar
Hi Sahar,
Firstly, congrats on such an ambitious project!
I did a few searches with Assista and over 50% of the links I clicked were dead. Maybe your system could automatically filter out dead links?
JP
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Thanks JP.. We’re aware of some issues with current DB, plan to work intensively on it next six months to make it flawless.
Cheers
Sahar
Sahar,
Interesting project. Will be interested to see how you integrate NLP into it.
One suggestion, with questions mostly beginning with the 5 Ws, who,what,where,why,when and how, I noticed that while using assista that most questions were preceeded with “what”. To me that offers an uneven set of Q’s to look at. I beleive offering a more balanced set of Q’s that include who,where,why,when and how will give the user a better experience and better data to assista.
Happy new Year!!
Cheers!
Chris
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Thanks Chris, and agree. This is all algo issues and will work to improve these issues as we go along.
Thanks again for the great feedback!
Sahar
Congratulations Sahar! I’ve been waiting for it. It seems to be working very well. Two things I’d change:
1. after registering, don’t redisplay the registration fields… it’s confusing. just show the result message in the middle of the page.
2. i’d like to see 100 results at a time, maybe you could allow the user to choose between 10, 25, 50 and 100.
Happy new year!!
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Hi Eric, and thanks!
1. We will work on registration usability. I think we have allot of work there.
2. We had this before when testing and may put it back up if users demand it. Somthing to think about.
Cheers
Sahar
Hello Sahar,
I think redirecting some domains is a very wise decision.
I think you could even send the visitors to a query that is relevant to the domain he just entered.
It is a lot of work but,
let’s say John types in wine.com (and let’s suppose you own wine.com), instead of being redirected to the assista homepage, redirect him to a page with questions about wine.
I am not sure if this would work for all your domains, but I think it is more relevant, and you could use this feature (if you don’t use it already) at least for the highly descriptive domains.
Congrats on Assista,
Alex
PS: I tend to type in asista (because this is a valid word in romanian). I don’t think asista.com is yours ….
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Hi Alex, and thanks for feedback. Yes, we will do it with some domains, some will send to homepage. As for Asista.com it isn’t ours, maybe one day. I do have another related domain in mind I want but will cost me seven figures. Maybe later the year, we shall see.
Cheers
Sahar
I love this concept, and your example using cystic fibrosis and the “brain cancer” and “Socratic method” links you have right under the search box at Assista show the power of it. However, the link for Hong Kong and searches like “George Washington” show that there’s plenty of work still to be done. Those results aren’t helpful at all (and are more than a little strange: Who is Huge Net Hong Kong?) — so much so that I’m afraid that the people who see it now will write it off completely and not ever come back. Would it have been better to get it closer to “right” before releasing it?
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Great feedback Shane, will work on it, should be fixed by tomorrow. As far as release, we’ve been working on it for more then three years now, wanted to get it out and running. Our main issues were speed, scalability. We feel we have dealt with our immediate need and from here on will improve. The feedback so far, including yours, has been extremely helpful.
Cheers
Sahar
Sahar,
Great concept, this is an idea that has been lacking in most search engines. Wish I would have had this at high school and university.
Site look and feel needs to be cleaned up! Still looks like a prototype instead of a world class site. Clean, simple and elegant is the key. The apple methodology of doing things would help. You never get a chance to make a second first impression! Please work on the colours.
On the bottom of the page, instead of displaying all the recent, top 10 searches, why don’t you have a break down similar to how Youtube to see recent videos. Allow people to see results by what they want to see. Looks like you are trying to fill the page.
Would be neat to break down search results by .com, .gov, .org….
By the way, typed in “Assista” and got no results back…..
Best of luck Sahar with Assista…. This is an idea worth working for.
Greg
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Encouraging feedback Greg, thanks!
Sahar