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Maybe something to do with the new spamdex Rand was touting on Plus? https://plus.google.com/111294201325870406922/posts/gbeKneoTDh8
agreed. I mention that in the post, but I dont think they'd make that large of a focus on the domain name for webspam. In Rands post, he discusses a very big secret project launching end of 2012 or early 2013.
I can neither confirm nor deny that Rand is building a moon laser.
lol.
Just like Chairface Chippendale: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeKH-N3mh0w
Actually they're building a social network to compete with Google Plus. Search engines are so 2005 ;) (I have no inside knowledge of their plans. I don't think Brad Feld gave them that money to build a search engine, largely because a) it makes no sense, b) it's not enough, and c) the marketing tools business seems to be working out pretty well.)
In all seriousness, it's easy to speculate, and yes $18M is a lot of money, but building and maintaining a link-graph is an expensive proposition that takes a lot of hardware and brainpower. Every step forward is a bit more computationally difficult and expensive. The gulf between even where SEOmoz is at and a full-blown search engine is very large. If you've studied Google's evolution (I'd highly recommend "In The Plex"), the scale of what they do is amazing - they not only have their own datacenters, but they build custom hardware, they have their own power plants, they have their own national fiber-optic infrastructure, etc. What they do has cost BILLIONS upon BILLIONS of dollars.
agreed. I commented on it with one sentence at the end, but there have been 100's of case studies showing Bings advertising and operations costs since inception. I should have described the niche focus of a project like duckduckgo instead of an all out competitor to google.
Interesting theory - I always thought they were just going to rebrand into a more general internet marketing toolset, but the evolution is definitely possible. And yes it definitely costs tons of money, but DuckDuckGo isn't exactly made out of gold, is it? I bet a person could pattern match Rand's slidedeck focus/social notes against potential investment activity to see where his brain is at in terms of pitching/overall focus to find some additional fuel to this fire. Of course confirmation bias (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias) would probably skew research, but if there was some tool/way to use keyword clouds/map over time that might shade some light. Also, there would be something ironic (and ugh worthy) about making a career/business out of SEO only to turn to PPC to fuel the monetization. Probably would see some backlash there.
I think it's fairly clear that Moz.com has been the holding place for if (and increasingly when) SEOmoz rebrands at Moz as a way to extend its tools beyond SEO and into inbound marketing. If you search for "SEOmoz to Rebrand Itself as Moz" here on Inbound, you'll find the past discussion of that (I don't want to add a link, as that generally gets a comment held in moderation for a short period of time. I'll post that separately). If you also look at Rand's post about the new investment, it was "Moz's $18 Million Venture Financing: Our Story, Metrics and Future" and not "SEOmoz's $18 Million Venture Financing: Our Story, Metrics and Future." Rand's way too sharp not to be deliberately using Moz in that headline, just as he has it as "Rand from Moz" down below. I think the only thing really holding back the obviously-in-the-works rebranding is that some in the SEOmoz community seem hesitant over the idea that SEOmoz pushes them beyond the SEO roots they may be comfortable with. If you look at "The Brand of SEO and the Trend of Inbound Marketing," Rand's SEOmoz post last March, many of the comments were pretty unusual for SEOmoz, in that they were fairly critical in general and specifically about the inbound concept. I took all that as a trial balloon that didn't go as planned. I don't think Rand meant for any of the SEO folks to think they were somehow needing to rename themselves inbound marketers do more than SEO. But for whatever reason, it didn't seem to go over so well. Still, I think it's fairly inevitable you'll have the rebranding. I think it's 99.99999999999999999999% unlikely they're rolling out a search engine to compete with Google. Make that 100.1% unlikely.
I don't think moz.com is search engine. It's rebranding. My theory is that they havent rebranded yet is because they have a trademark for Moz pending..
There's been an edit to the post linked here: Edit: Rand was nice enough to respond and explained a few things… his comment – “No plans to build a public search engine, though we’ll likely keep developing the back end elements and perhaps someday even have a sandbox where one can see how our algorithms/metrics compare to the engines (definitely a few years or more away).”
Exciting! I can't wait to see what it is.