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Why HowDoYa.com?

There are over 15 billion Web searches per month in the US and 3% include the phrase "how-to." Over seven million adults search daily for help on how to do something. Search site click-thru-rates are less than .25%. Yet, engines average $15/1000 queries. Consumers searching for how-to have a higher purchase intent — and presenting contextually relevant advertising can dramatically increase click through and conversion.

The First How-To Search Engine

HowDoYa.com is the first how-to search engine. HowDoYa helps consumers write better, more precise how-to search queries, which in turn delivers better search results. HowDoYa also precisely matches advertisers with consumer intent, dramatically increasing traditional CPM and conversion rates.

With HowDoYa, searchers receive better results related to how-to queries and are presented with conceptually related topics. Topics serve as purchasable items or can refine search results. Advertisers buy topics that appear in how-to search results. E.g. an advertisement for “bbq sauce” would appear when someone searched for “How to smoke ribs” or any search where it was a related concept.

Two Key Innovations

HowDoYa has two key innovations — first, it brings context to a search, so that queries are better constructed, allowing us to infer a great deal about the user's intent. Second, by understanding context, we know exactly what the user is thinking, so we deliver better results, related concepts and advertising.

History

HowDoYa was established in January 2008. The company was spun out from Contextware, Inc. an enterprise software company incorporated in 2001 that counts among its customers the Electric Boat Corporation, NIH, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Secret Service, General Dynamics and Washington Gas. Along with the spin-out of this consumer concept branded as HowDoYa, Contextware has transferred intellectual property including patent pending (Application No. 11/854,803 “Software system for rules-based searching of data”). HowDoYa.com launched in beta form in February 2008, and went live to the public in May 2008.

The Howdoya Team

David Ian Forbes
Information Design

In addition to co-founding Howdoya in 2008, Dave also founded Emantix, to bring to market a techology platform that can automatically determine meaning, context and relevance in any kind of information. Before that, Dave was the founder and CEO of Contextware, Inc., an award-winning innovator in knowledge management software systems, Dave is an expert on designing effective visual, linguistic and conceptual software interactions. Dave brings over two decades experience in advertising, media, marketing communications, visual design and usability engineering. Prior to Contextware, Dave was responsible for branding, product marketing and usability engineering for a Kodak digital asset technology spinoff. Before that, he was responsible for corporate communications and product development for the D. Appleton Company, an early leader in business process innovation. Dave has also worked in corporate marketing, for advertising agencies, and in film and video production. He holds a BA in Advertising from Drake University.

David Austin
Sales, Marketing & Public Relations

Most recently co-founder and President of Contextware, David is responsible for sales operations and managing strategic partnerships. Before Contextware, David was responsible for Industry and Alliance Marketing & Sales Operations at Manugistics Group, where he developed and executed awareness and demand generation activities across the company’s key industry verticals. In addition, he held responsibility for all sales operational areas including training, sales force automation, forecasting, sales process, response to proposals and turning early stage opportunities into winnable sales pipeline as part of a defined demand-to-cash process. Prior to Manugistics, David held management roles at Visteon Automotive Systems, at the time a $20 billion spin-out from Ford Motor company, where he was responsible for marketing strategy and advanced technology strategy and held various management roles at MCI Telecommunications responsible for Competitive Analysis and Reporting and Strategic Account acquisition. David holds a BA and a Masters in International Transactions and Business, both from George Mason University.

Sharon is a computational linguist, an expert in natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval.From 1998 to 2002, she worked for eMotion, Inc. where she rose to the position of CTO & Vice President of Technology. She is a co-holder of the patent on eMotion’s natural language-based multimediasearch engine(and has six other patents pending). From 1988 to 1998, Sharon worked at SRA International in NLP, including requirements analysis, system design, syntax, semantics, discourse, and morphology. She designed and developed software for PNI, now PictureQuest, which SRA spun off in 1993. She also served as Director of Digital Library Technology, locating and developing business opportunities in the areas of information management, bioinformatics, and multimedia archiving, search and retrieval. Sharon received her A.B. from Cornell University and her Ph.D. from Harvard in linguistics. She has taught at Georgetown, Harvard and Pace University, and has authored over 30 academic papers and presentations.


Corporate Headquarters

Howdoya, Inc.
4216 Evergreen Lane, Suite 111
Annandale, Virginia 22003 USA
Phone: 703.582.6055

Please use our form on the search results page to contact us by email.