Skeptic #1 - BigDaddy the next google...

Boy don't you hate the hype?

Personally I don't think they will be the next Google.

Here are 10 reasons (all IMHO):

1. Their domain name sucks. I have looked at their site 3 times now, and each time can't remember whether it's bigdaddy.com bigdaddysearch.com searchbigdaddy.com

2. They are using Smart CGIs script. While I have nothing against this script (I even bought a copy of an earlier version myself), I doubt it scales to big sites. It's the one used by all the tiny PPCs sites. It costs between $0 and $99 depending on which version you get. Even the authors implicitly admit it isn't for enterprise use (they contrast it to the $3000 JackHammer script which they say is for enterprise use).

3. And by the way the fact they are using an off-the-shelf script, means they have no real technical advantage as compared to any other search engine.

4. When you do a search, there is a big IFRAME above the results - and it's he wrong size. Sorry this is basic stuff.

5. I tried a search yesterday and got some of their results and some results from another search engine as the backfill. Later the backfill disappeared which means most searches give very few or no results (I wonder if the other search engine whose results they were using for backfill blocked them). Now try a search, and you don't get anything except a maintenance page.

7. You can't bookmark the result pages, because it doesn't include the search criteria in the URL.

8. Alexa gives them a rank of 25,000. That doesn't sound too bad. (Although you need consider that marketers more frequently have Alexa than non-marketers and thus the Alexa rank is probably much better than their real rank as BigDaddy is full of marketers promoting their stuff, and not so many real searchers).

But you really need to look at reach...

BigDaddy = about 750 per million (according to Alexa)

Google = about 275,000 per million

Yahoo = about 300,000 per million

10. All those $50 free ad blocks will have to get used up before they can start earning real money from advertising. I wonder how long that will take given that few people would actually want to use their search (point 2 and 4 for example) in real work.

And

11. I doubt they have enough money to spend on advertising $ to establish themselves in the public's conscience.

In short, these guys have done a brilliant job of pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps, but I don't think they're gonna be the next Google.