Alex takes the red pill

Alex Edelman is leaving Findory and joining IMDb today.

If you have never checked out the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), you definitely should. It's filled with detailed information and reviews about movies. Don't miss their remarkable power search that lets you do elaborate searches for things like "highly rated Sci Fi movies made after 2001 with more than 500 votes".

The problem with being a frugal, self-funded startup is that you're a frugal, self-funded startup. After 14 months without a salary, Alex felt he needed a steady source of income, and Findory is not able to provide that for him.

I am proud of what Alex and I built together at Findory. The last 14 months have been extraordinary:

• Traffic growth: In the last 14 months, Findory traffic grew nearly 1800% from 250k hits/month to 4.4M hits/month.


• Redesigns: We had two major redesigns (original, first, current).


• Servers: Findory deployed four additional servers as we grew, bringing our total to six.


• Press: We enjoyed seeing press coverage in Time Magazine, Spiegel, The Times, eWeek, Seattle PI, Seattle Times, Puget Sound Business Journal, Searcher Magazine, Forbes.com, Search Engine Watch, InsideGoogle, Online Journalism Review, and many other places.


• Millions of feeds: We launched millions of different RSS feeds, helping people read and consume information from Findory any way they like it. Our unusual personalized versions of our feeds learn and adapt as you read articles from the feeds.


• Inline Findory: Inline Findory lets bloggers put a snippet of their Findory front page on their weblog.


• Findory API: The Findory API lets other sites remix Findory data for fun and profit.


• Personalized web search: Our alpha of our personalized web search modifies web search results using each person's search and clickstream history.


• Personalized news and blogs searches: Our personalized news and blogs searches highlight articles in your search results that Findory recommends based on your reading history.


• Search history: Search history makes it easy to find things you found once before.


• Source pages: For any news site or weblog in our database, source pages show recent articles, related news sites and weblogs, and related articles.


• Findory feed reader: In September 2005, we launched our personalized feed reader. Unlike other feed readers, Findory's feed reader recommends articles that are particularly likely to be interesting to you.


• Personalized advertising: Recently, we launched our personalized advertising engine. It picks advertisements based on not only the content of the page, but also which articles each reader has read in the past.

I wish Alex the best of fortune at IMDb and in the future. We achieved a lot together at Findory, but there is much left to do. I look forward to continuing to innovate and build on Findory.com.