I had a chat with Majid ALSarra from Lyreach (the innovative search engine for lyrics that I featured last month on MusicKO) where he revealed the inspiration behind the project and his plans for the future. You can find it below. And don’t forget to check out Part 2 (“Music & You”).
Majid ALSarra
Full Name: Majid ALSarra
Age: 29
Startup: Lyreach
Position: Founder
PART I
THE STARTUP
Tell us a little about your startup. How was it conceived?
Everything started two years ago, I used to be a software developer my whole life and I really loved it, but in mid-2008 I decided to be a boring man ,working in a boring field called business continuity in a startup bank started by the government.
I tried stupidly to live with such a situation, to have what I thought was a stable life, then I exploded.
I began programming everything like crazy; I was searching for a killer idea, I had been searching for such a thing even before the bank job. I have always been enthusiastic about the Web, but when I was in the bank I was too depressed to find a good idea.
And because I didn’t know “anything” about business continuity, I was searching in Google, and translating some stuff in a dictionary – in both cases using auto-completed sentences. “Google suggest” gave me some nice (but limited) recommendations. A lot of sentences that looked like what I had typed were featured, but I thought “why they’re not here in the suggestions?. Even when I click the “Search” button, it gives results that have the words of the input sentence separated randomly in a lot of results, even when I put the double quotation marks, I can see the sentence alone in the results, but I have to open the link and search for the sentence to find its context…” Then the idea popped out!
It kept brewing it in my mind for a while, and I began programming some code and testing it on some Wikipedia pages, I had more complicated (and also more useful) ideas than this one, but I didn’t have the time to implement them, so I decided to go ahead with this one.
Searching the whole Web was too huge for my tiny budget, that was why I thought about Wikipedia, but then I realized it would take ages to crawl their 6000,000 articles (English only!). So, I kept living as usual with these search ideas in my head, until I noticed how unpleasant it was when I heard a part of a song and could not find it by searching using only that specific part. It all clicked then, and the idea was finally conceived 🙂
What was the original launch date?
No exact date, it was there on the web for a long time while I was debugging it, then I told some friends to test it, and then I finally put the ads on Facebook & Google sometime in mid-May.
What has been the response so far?
It’s been good, a lot of sites & blogs talk about it all over the world, especially in Italy! Continue reading →
