I used to read management journals in my spare time. A lot of management authors, professors said that “Size does matter.” This statement can either be commonplace or controversial, depending on which industry they’re referring to, and which company as well. In the search engine sector, there is a newly launched ATUNN and it is working on its way to this “Size does Matter” path.

On the front page of ATUNN, you’ll find a variety of services such as mail, music, movies, news & newspaper, games, social networks, IM, language tools, and applications. Click on any of these will load a page of the external URL links to different startups that offered that particular service. It is a bit look like meta search engine, but indeed it is not.

ATUNN want to act as a search engine that covers a lot of stuff. In its straight-forward slogan, “All That U Need Now!” it tried to maximize its value through building a lot of external URL links in its back-end programming. However, maximizing a new search engine’s value through variety of external Web pages is often seen as inefficient, lack of focus, and even anti niche. But credits given to them on its sleek design and fast loading.

I just came across an interesting article entitled, “The Premier Meta-Search Engine, SearchGuy.com announces launch of the beta version of its refreshing new design with enhanced features” from Yahoo!, it’s about a meta search engine that called SearchGuy.com. With the goal as the “World’s Leading Search Engine of Choice”, SearchGuy has integrated its Web search with image, video, news, shopping, tag, photos, and the proposed job and blog search. Though SearchGuy did not gained the brand value as Google or Yahoo! did on the Web, I think it is progressing quite well, albeit slow since its first inception in 2001. On its “About page”, SearchGuy has released the Spanish version of search engine and also released the current stable version of 2.0. In addition, SearchGuy also developed the desktop search, toolbar as well as the Firefox plugin that with the purpose of increase the quality of the user experience for its users.

However, SearchGuy faced many challenges in the beginning of this year. They are currently undergo the transition period as Lenny Ratchitsky, the President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO), is leaving the Company to pursue other business interests, according to this article. As stated in the above, I observed that SearchGuy has follow the footstep of some established players in product development such as the proposed job and blog search, Firefox plugin, desktop search, and etc. I wonder how this meta search engine will achieve the product differentiation when compared to some of its competitors in the market. On the other hand, in terms of meta search, it’s no longer a new thing. According to an article from UC Berkeley, it has questioned about are “smarter” meta-searchers still smarter? I wonder SearchGuy still has some more room left to grow when there are some established meta search engines such as jux2, Dogpile, Clusty, Mamma, and Ithaki in the market. It seems that the main challenge for SearchGuy now is to refine its search strategy in order to meet the specific needs and wants of the users on the Web.