I recently had the privilege of interviewing Neal Verma, one of the founders of iRazoo, a search engine that uses Web 2.0 and the power of its user community to provide more relevant search results to all users. iRazoo is a Houston-based company that just launched their site about 2 months ago and Neal brought me up to speed with all of the great things going on there.

Startup Houston (SH): How did iRazoo get started?
Neal Verma (NV): iRazoo got started based on ideas I’ve had about how to create a better search engine. The need to create our solution was because of the irrelevant and large quantity of results returned by current search engines. Most search engines today return millions of results that are irrelevant or manipulated by Search Engine Optimization marketing companies. When most users come to a search engine they have a specific question and are looking for a specific answer. What happens though is that each user has to go on a treasure hunt to find the one result, among thousands or millions, that really answers their keyword query. In this treasure hunt that user is seeking the answer that is like a piece of gold. iRazoo will provide search results that help users strike gold quicker.

SH: What do you think the odds are for iRazoo at this stage of the search engine game?
NV: The real question here is can a small band of guys uproot a big gorilla? The answer is yes. It’s already been done. Yahoo used to be king and now Google is. Relevancy won in the end of that race and we can be even more relevant using human intelligence and collaboration. Our goal is to have 99.9 relevancy within the first 3 search results. Google’s stated mission is to organize all of the info in the world. iRazoo’s mission is not only to do that, but to also increase its relevancy and timeliness. We are getting closer to this goal every day.