The Vinquire Chronicles, Vol 1

Oct 26, 2007 |  John (12) |  Founders |  1 comment

I wanted to share with our users some history on Vinquire, including what our overall plan is for the website. This blog will be my soapbox for that purpose -- along with some Vinquire cheerleading occasionally. Check this blog for updates once every week or two.

Vinquire was born out of a desire, 2 years ago, to create a user oriented wine review site. The Web 2.0 social networking space was expanding, and there was nothing for the wine world. However, Andy (the other founder) and I are both engineers, so we couldn't just do a community oriented website; we wanted a search engine.

Search is hi-tech, challenging, and profitable. So we began an attempt to merge our two features; a social networking site along w/ a search engine that mines retailers and wineries for inventories.

The result, after almost 2 years, is top-notch search engine. Most people know the thousand pound gorilla of wine search is Wine-Searcher. However, Wine-Searcher is tricky; if you don't pay their subscriber fee, they significantly limit search results by only displaying wines from paying sponsors. Vinquire displays every result, for free, every time. Even comparing Vinquire against the paid version of Wine-Searcher, we frequently beat their results.

Every week, we download millions and millions of web pages, use extremely advanced artificial intelligence to mine those pages for wine, then cluster and display results for our users to peruse. Because of this hi-tech search engine backing, Vinquire can do more than other wine community sites. We can help you find rare bottles and we know average bottle prices, so you can see if you're getting a good deal at your local retailer. And, we never require users to enter a wine name; we already know all the wine names!

There's a lot more that we do. But I won't go off the deep end in my first blog. The reality is, we still have a lot of work to do, but Vinquire is growing in users and employees - keep an eye on us over the next 6 months as we launch new features and rev up our marketing engine. Talk soon -

John Kleven
Founder, Vinquire.com

Founders

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