KallOut: The Gold Box That Takes Search Out Of The Square

I got an email last week from Matt Lorenzen, VP of Product for KallOut, a pretty revolutionary new way to "do" search using either IE or FireFox.

Before I did the install, just for kicks I kept count of the number of searches I do in a typical work day. The number (on Friday, a typical day in terms of my activity) was 311. That's a lot of pageviews for my Search choice, Yahoo.

You know I review a lot of products and platforms and apps and all the rest here, and I generally don't say negative things. I prefer to use silence for things I don't like. Well, the fact that I am writing about it is an indication that I like KallOut. But an even BETTER indicator of how much I like KallOut is the fact that I downloaded the application onto all four of my PCs. This thang puts the K in Kool.

Yes, you do have to download it. That'll turn off some of you. And I get that. But it's worth the download.

Watch this vid to see how it works. No asterisk on works.If the proof is in the pudding, here's a nice pudding commercial:


KallOut Overview from kallout on Vimeo.

My test drive was pretty extensive, but here is an example:

I highlighted the name "Sarah Palin" on Wonkette.com, and about one second later the little speech bubble box lighted gold. By rolling over that gold box, a Kallout appears that offers a variety of content choices. Click on a choice and up comes the article or photo or whatever. See below:





That's right boys and girls, you get to consume the KallOut content without leaving the page you are on.

KallOut combines content from a broad range of sources. You can go into the settings and favor or disfavor sources as you wish. For example, below I show you how to eliminate the evil of non Yahoo search engines. ;-)



Two clicks and you can make it Yahoo pristine!

Oh anyway, my love for Yahoo notwithstanding, the flexibility of this tool is rather impressive.

In addition to allowing you to do KallOuts on IE and FireFox, the tool also works in Office applications and PDFs, which will also come in very handy. KallOut can also be used as a search window direct from the desktop by simply clicking on the icon in the task bar. You can also "store" KallOuts by minimizing them for use later.

So, another thing you may be wondering is how this will affect the browser based search. Lee Lorenzen, CEO, stated on his blog:

While “browser-based search” will always be important, our early data shows that “selection-based search” can generate an incremental number of total searches per user per day that ranges from 1x to 3x the number of browser-based searches. At scale, this tripling of the number of search queries performed has the potential to dramatically increase the size of the search query pie and convince the world that search is not a zero-sum game.

Since this is a marketing blog, I wondered how they expect to make money, and if you can "buy" results like you do in google or yahoo pages. The answer is that they have a number of plans in the works from text based to graphical, so watch for some major announcements shortly. In their communications to me, Lee Lorenzen, the CEO emphasized "Our top priority is that any ads we decide to show in KallOut are appreciated by our users and don’t distract from the information they are seeking."

Currently they seem even more focused on growing share and installs, which makes sense. No sense trying to sell marketing opps until you have eyeballs. I'll be posting more about Kallout -- this is a goodie.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.