WINNER Vurb | Disrupt NY 2014 Startup Battlefield

The Vurb web engine turns finding things into doing things. When you type a query in Vurb, you get everything you need without having to leave the search engine. The company is rolling out search for Places, Movies, and Media. It will soon launch search for add People, Startups, and others. For example, if you search for a film, you get a trailer, showtimes, reviews, a link to watch the movie on Netflix, the IMDb score and more.

TechCrunch Disrupt is one of the most anticipated technology conferences of the year. From May 5th - May 7th, TechCrunch TV will be airing exclusive coverage from Manhattan Center in NYC. Disrupt NY has an all new slate of outstanding startups, influential speakers, and celebrity guests.

[sidetraxx]

The simplest ideas are the best. Props to this team. 

[rocktcatU]

We're making the world a better place... I love the Silicon Valley series for exposing a lot of the horse shit coming out of the industry...

[JassimAli]

The cards approach is definitely an improvement versus opening up multiple tabs to make that one decision, however the fact still remains that most of the actions (social/share buttons) are still quite superficial and not something that 90% of the users are looking for..the killer punch here it potentially opens up the cards form beyond google to any app owner (think a chain of cinemas or restaurants who want to enhance their current experience beyond the obvious) but full marks for visualizing elegantly

[DavidFregoli]

as long as the web is sustained on ads, no one will ever give up his website visits and handover his data for free

[DaleDriven]

Dude! imagine using this for porn! it would make life so easy if you wanna watch more than one video. 

[mountainman]

As of 2016, Snap Inc acquired Vurb for $100m+

[thecalabiyaumanifold]

I find it more elegant than other search engines

[hrishirise]

Such an old ...old idea... Surprised they won.This was my graduate project in 2007 @ USC.
 Semantic web has been around for like 10 years and crawling blah blah is too old.

The biggest problem is crawling is restricted by some websites. And Semantic web has to be manually customized with particular websites only. It cannot automatically crawl a new website from no where.
Also, people will never ever accept that Vurb, has the best crawling sites from its limited source.
And worse, if those websites change their layouts (which they do), the entire Vurb engine will break.
Seriously, not a single judge asked these questions?

[tejaskumthekar]

8+ years later and this problem still exists.

[folarinosibodu]

Google is going to acquire them to improve their knowledge graph

[paawansagar]

Everyone is hating here because they cant do it themselves and they didnt get into techCrunch

[FrankGonzalezIV]

All this isn't possible without the APIs from the sites he's talking about.

[vigneshpadmanabhan]

I tried it here in India..and it isn't working here.. ??Is this app limited to just US?

[juggernaut]

Wow! This clearly worked great as Snapchat acquired them for 114.5 million dollars!

[SanjitRoyRosisky]

Isnt this what Google has tried to do with Google Now ?? 

[nadirhamid]

Decentralized content is usually better we've learnt this from software a very long time ago. This seems nice but not really something I like

[cameronhill]

Now sold for 110 million to snapchat. Looks like these entrepreneurs are better than that investor. Seeing his advice was shit.

[arunasvabhuyan]

Apparently Snapchat bought this for 115 mil

[monsterstacks]

they should've just spoke with apple and sold this ui for use in Safari

[chiragshah]

i dont know how will they monotize.Twitter is still not successful at monotization.They need to be profitable else will burn