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Hello, Just a little update…. we are still reviewing the submitted Launch Ideas and their Votes. We will be posting an updated roster and tally list as soon as we can (or just keep tabs on your RSS feed). Thanks again for such a great response to the contest and all of your submissions.

Remember, we will not be announcing the winner until the June 29th webcast. So please check back for more details on the webcast in the coming week…

Thank you again!
- The Blog Management Team

Yeah, we won a Webby! Well we got an official honoree award in the mail for our OLD site, pre May 15th re-launch. The committee reviewed the site ages ago, and since then we of course have overhauled Snap almost 1000%. It’s ironic to say the least, but we are very happy about the award regardless.

Next year we will of course be submitting our new and improved site for the 2007 Webby Awards. We’ll see what happens then. Until then, please give a BIG congrats to the entire team! Oh and don’t forget to vote for Snap in 2007!

View the Webby Awards Site.

As some of you have recently been emailing and commenting on, yes, we are postponing the announcement of the contest winner and posting of the awards video until after the July 4th holiday weekend. Due to a number of internal decisions, we have opted to wait until Wednesday, July 5th, to make the announcement and release the video.

Please bear with us, and (if you can) wait a bit longer for this all to happen. We are committed to the contest and thank you for your interest and participation in getting the word out.

Please stay tuned and thanks again!
- The Blog Management Team

This is the post you all have been waiting for: “The other way to Launch” contest winner has been selected and the $5000 prize has been awarded! Before we announce the winner, we wanted to share a bit about the great response and how we selected a winner.

The response was awe-inspiring: over 30,000 of you visited our blog, submitted over 175 ideas and cast more than 3,000 votes. More importantly, you posted some great ideas that we’re seriously evaluating and many of you tried Snap and shared it with your friends. Thanks for all of your effort and hard work!

Counting the votes turned out to be a little harder than we anticipated. We took this contest seriously and wanted to make sure that all the votes were placed by real people, not machines (remember Florida?). We did an in-depth analysis of the votes and log files for the top 10 ideas (plus a few extra to compensate for several disqualifications) looking for unusual voting patterns and anything else that smelled of machine. Here’s an example that compares two sets of log files for two separate contest ideas:

There is an obvious difference in the voting patterns between the two samples. The one on the left was submitted by one IP over a short period of time. In contrast, the one on the right was submitted by many IPs in an irregular time pattern.

Here are the top 10 ideas post-analysis with votes logged…

And the winner is…drum roll please:

Geek Works Unlimited of Palm Desert, California
with the “Pay Per Click Credits” idea.

They received a whopping 670 votes! They told us during an interview that their community rallied behind them and voted them up to the top. This is a prime example of the true power of community, both offline and in the blogosphere.

There are no losers

We were really inspired by the innovative thinking that you put into many of the ideas. Most of us at Snap, not just us marketing folk, have read through the submissions and discussed several at length. While there was one prize winner, there may be several of you that are contacted by us in the weeks to come to discuss your idea.

View the Webcast:

Windows Media WMV (19mb)

QuickTime MOV (39mb)

We hope you had fun creating, voting and commenting on these ideas. Thanks and see you for the next Snap contest.

-The Snap Blog Team

This one is for all the Firefox browser enhancers out there…

Firefox has this neat feature to enable you to add terms that trigger searches. In this case you can create one for Snap that is accessible from anywhere in your browsing experience all from within the location bar of your Firefox browser.

Here is how…

1. Go to the Snap.com Home Page… right click (or control click for OSX users) in the Search Box… You will see the ‘Add a Keyword for this Search…’ menu choice… select it…

2. You will be prompted with a window that looks suprisingly like the ‘Add a Bookmark’ menu… type in Snap in the Name field and lowercase(!) ’snap’ in the Keyword field… Then click on the Add button. Dont worry about where to save this search trigger, its transparent to the Bookmarks folder… Once you have saved the search trigger, you can now access it from anywhere in your Firefox browsing experience…

3. In this case I was accessing a prefab modern home manufactures site… I wanted to get more information on this company by conducting a search for them on Snap.com… So I entered in the Snap + ‘Keyword’ trigger string in the Firefox location bar… as soon as I hit the enter (or return) key, the ‘Keyword’ was sent to Snap.com to do a search…

4. Once the term was sent to Snap.com and the search was loaded, I was quickly able to see that this manufacture has relevant results and warrants some time reading through all of the sites listed in regards to them…

This little shortcut makes searching on Snap that much easier… and if you want a more visual results experience… it adds the ‘Keyword’ trigger to access Snap from wherever you are online (using Firefox), without having to first navigate to the Snap.com homepage to trigger a search!

Wow, this really makes searching a Snap! ;)

Snap has recently worked out a partnership with Popurls (a very cool RSS media buzz feed aggregator) to power the web searches off of the site. Its live now! Many Snap folks use them as their homepage. Now not only can you read what’s going on RIGHT NOW anywhere online, but you can search on Snap too!

Recently John Battelle polled his own Searchblog readers about who they wanted to see him interview next. You guessed it, the highest vote getter was Bill Gross(!) Now thats pretty cool… You can read the transcript of the email interview here Interview: BIll Gross. They even talk about Snap.com in the article, as if! There are some good user submitted questions as well… Its def worth a read!

Snap is featured in TIME.com: 50 Coolest Websites of 2006 list this AM! This is a great win for us! We are all very excited here and truely appreciate TIME recognizing the innovation and thought put into our search experience!

According to TIME, this year’s choices are shining examples of next-generation sites offering dynamic new ways to inform and entertain, with cutting-edge tools to create, consume, share or discuss all manner of media, from blog posts to video clips.

“How do we select our finalists? We evaluate hundreds of candidates-some suggested by readers, colleagues and friends, others discovered during countless hours of surfing. We look at content and design, purpose and execution, style and smarts,” Maryanne Buechner writes on TIME.com.

Our CEO Tom McGovern had some comments on this… “We’re thrilled that Snap.com’s unique, visual approach to Web search caught TIME’s editors’ eye. Millions of users have come to rely on Snap.com’s improved search experience for their quest for information on the Web and we’re honored to be included in this year’s list.”

Snap – This new Google-competitor records and analyzes past searches to help determine relevancy, favoring sites where surfers visited most frequently and lingered the longest. Search results are displayed on the left side of the page, while the other side provides a visual preview (which you can choose to view in small, medium or large).

Read complete article…

Thanks to editor David E. Gumpert, who wrote a recent article in the Business Week blog talking about the Snap ‘Other Way to Launch’ contest and its viral popularity… He also mentioned that he has started using Snap as a result…

The promo has encouraged me to use snap.com and I’ve found it has features that distinguish it positively from Google, such picture previews of sites it comes up with and lots of media citations.

Thanks again for the positive coverage and interest in Snap!

Read: The Bootstrap Report: How Do You Generate Buzz and Compete with Google?

Snap is featured as a ‘DO’ in the The Weekend Guide EVERYWHERE Edition of Daily Candy (for Aug 24th 2006). So now you have to get your Daily Snap huh?

DO
Snap.com
What: The broadband search engine is super resourceful and produces stellar results (once you get used to it).
Why: Come on, get snappy.
Where: Online at snap.com.

View: Daily Candy, EVERYWHERE Edition, The Weekend Guide (for Aug 24th, 2006)