And The Winner Is: Search’s Rich List + Most Valuable “Startups”
People love lists. Publishers love lists too because they sell copies of traditional print newspapers and magazines and, online, they generate lots of clicks and page views. For example, the HuffingtonPost has become a veritable archive of slideshows: “the 10 best places to live,” the “hottest beach bods of the summer” and so on. US News sells lots copies of its infamous “Best Colleges & Universities” issue. The more venerable but no less cynical Forbes’ “Richest People in America” is in the same vein.
So without further ado . . . the envelope please (thanks Gary Price). Here are the Richest Men — yes all men — in search, a modified and slightly snarky version of the Forbes list:
- #1 Bill Gates: $54 billion (still sort of qualifies because of Microsoft connection)
- #11 & #12: Larry & Sergey: $15 billion (no last names required)
- #16: Steve Ballmer: $13.1 billion
- #24: Carl Icahn: $11 billion (included here for his time on Yahoo’s board as pro-Microsoft gadfly)
- #35: Mark Zuckerberg: $7 billion (not a search engine, but Facebook’s got search — Olé!)
- #42: Steve “people aren’t using search” Jobs: $6.1 (hey, apps are search-like)
- #48: Eric Schmidt: $5.45 billion (runs one of those search engines if I remember correctly)
- #144: Mark Cuban: $2.5 billion (he blogs about search sometimes — and has lots of opinions about Google)
- #221: Mark Menioff: $1.8 billion (because lots of people are searching for enterprise software alternatives)
- #266: John Doerr: $1.55 billion (he got rich off his Google investment)
Moving on now to Silicon Alley Insider and its “Digital 100” list of the most “valuable” startups, based on valuations. Here are the top 30:
- Zynga
- Wikipedia
- Skype
- Craigslist
- Vente-Privee
- Yandex
- Betfair
- Groupon
- Taobao
- Mozilla Corp
- HomeAway
- Tudou
- GoDaddy
- Hulu
- AdKnowledge
- The Ladders
- eHarmony
- Gilt Groupe
- Demand Media
- Palantir Tech
- coupons.com
- livingsocial
- Yelp
- Youku
- Active Network
- pandora
- MediaBank
Many of the sites on the list above have search as a prominent component of the user experience, but it’s interesting that there aren’t really any “search engines” on the list, unless you count Yelp. Further down there are a number of vertical search sites: Kayak, Oodle, Zillow, AngiesList.
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