by Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

I’m still fighting a cold and trying to recover from a meltdown in my Outlook (switching to Thunderbird to recover files…) but I wanted to quickly mention that Become.com is a company that has risen quite highly on my personal “watch” list.

Become.com launched its beta search engine site yesterday. This is probably the first search company I’ve come across that could very well give Google a run for its money. I met with the founders, Michael Yang and Yeogirl Yun a couple of weeks ago and came away very impressed with them and their team.

Mr. Yang and Mr. Yun founded mySimon, the shopping comparison site sold to Cnet in early 2000 for about $700m. It’s a nice round number; but it was not a sale that was in their control. This time around they want to fulfill a number of key objectives that they were not able to complete at mySimon.

Mr. Yun is a contemporary of the Google boys at Stanford U, and has built a reputation as one of the top search engine experts. He has lead the development of a way of creating a page rank that Become.com says is spam proof: it is impervious to all attempts at search engine optimization. "Don’t say that," I said, "you’ll have everyone trying to challenge your claims!"

"That’s fine," they said, confident that their Affinity Index Ranking (AIR) technology consistently produces higher quality search results than from any other search engine. Become.com’s focus is on shopping and related content such as product reviews; but that is probably just a bit of cloaking, since it can clearly be used as a very effective general purpose search engine.

I’ll have more to report on Become.com very soon; in the meantime register for the beta and test it out. Let me know what you think.

cd1330