Interview with BigClique Creator Femi Olu

This interview is continued from page two.

How about five years from now. Where do you see yourselves, or hope to see yourselves?

Five years from now BigClique will have greatly evolved. The future is very promising and looking very attainable right now. I will take BigClique to Wall Street within 5 years, but ONLY on my terms. I have so many things on the table that if I had private investment $$ I could start on all of them right away (today).

The technology is already in place and completed and with investments I could compete head to head with the 3 major search engines (Yahoo, Google & MSN) within 1 year and start closing the gap overnight. What I can offer, the other search engines cannot put into place so quick just because of their corporate structure and committed "contracts". BigClique will always be run as "cells" and very "hands-on" like Blogs/Forums where user feedback is read and actioned on ASAP so users can see we listen.

I really am not the stereotypical "Corporate" Harvard type of a guy and this freedom allows me to venture into unknown territory and fix problems as they arise and create technical features with no barriers on thought, however, sometimes having a lot of knowledge can be your own downfall.

I doubt you will ever see me in a big office 5 years from now, as I now run BigClique from my Laptop and PC from my home. Right now, BigClique is a "sleeping giant" (with two eyes open), a bit like Google back in 1999 and Yahoo & MSN never saw them coming, now look where Google is today. (Well done Google!)

What makes you excited to work on this most of all, or what keeps you going?

What really gets me going are the users as BigClique was created for them. To see something you created and people utilize it is a very nice feeling. When you go to the the major search engines and basically get the same search results it's not good for anyone, and basically this is a monopoly for the few sites that always are number 1 to 10 in the search results.

Now that I possess relatively the same search engine technology I can assure you that many of those top 3 or 10 search results have NOTHING to do with seo or relevancy but undisclosed PAID adverts for specific keywords. This is very easy to do in the search engines backend config and something I WILL NEVER DO (my morals will not allow me too). BigClique search results are based on proper keyword searches, site optimization and our algorithms. We show users search results from websites with no unfair position weighting involved or assigned keywords to undisclosed paying companies.

Since creating BigClique I have been inundated with these type of "requests or contract demands" from WELL KNOWN companies offering me LOTS of money to place them top 3 in the web search results and I have rejected ALL and will continue to do so. So if you are one of those companies reading this please do not contact me offering this type of "cash".

The whole essence of BigClique was to defeat this type of malpractice not be in competition with it. I am sure many of you have gone to search engines and typed in a particular keyword and whatever search enigne you are on, their very own search engine listing will be at the top. This happens a lot for education type searches, so the same way they can manipulate these top results is the same way they can manipulate the rest of the search results.

What do you feel is/are the most important goal(s) of BigClique at this time?

At this moment, I have many important goals for BigClique. I usually work on more than 10 things at once just because of the nature of the search engine business. Saying that though, building the search index, keeping on top of the relevancy of the search results and removing spam websites is a daily task... but one which I have control of and love doing thanks to all the feedback I get from users.

As our name suggests, the word "Clique" means a group of people working together and/or with the same interests and this has helped me further the cause of the search engine with like-minded users pulling together. I think I have garnered a lot of support for the simple reason users see the hard work I am putting into BigClique and I have a hands-on approach to user feedback and I make the end user the top priority.