DC: Part of the philosophy here is that I want to display the most trustworthy and authoritative information in whichever language it's in.  So, if I'm looking for a German vineyard, it may be that the most authoritative page [on that] is in German.  If I'm looking for information on Nebbiolo, probably the very best pages — and I know they are — are in Italian.  And those will be hidden on Google and on Yahoo.  So the problem [in using those search engines] is that you'd be missing a lot of the authoritative content.  This way [using Able Grape], at least it gives you, the user, the choice to look at the best page — which is [often in another language, like] German or Italian — or to look at something that's only in English.  Ultimately, I'm going to put some translation facilities in here.

{Pointing to a result of the search query on his laptop, during a demonstration} If you type "Nebbiolo" here, you'll get some English pages, but now you've got this page in Italian — this is the most geeky, in-depth source of information on Nebbiolo.  It's got all the clones, the vigor, the fertility, the pruning and training methods, and so on.  This is one of the best pages in the world for Nebbiolo and you cannot find it with Google!  Yeah, you get some of the same results [on Google], but you just find that after the first result or two you're just going to get complete crap.  Whereas here [on Able Grape], you're going to get pages and pages and pages of all quality results.  Now, one of the things I'm not as good as they are [at Google] is finding news or a blog post that just happened yesterday.  But the truth is, 99.9% of the wine world simply doesn't change from one day to the next.

NM: From my perspective, as someone who's studied and continues to read about wine, Able Grape strikes me as an extremely useful tool.  What are you doing to get the word out, to let the wine world know about this?

DC: I'm getting there.  I launched at the beginning of February [2008].  And for most of this time, I've been using word of mouth to grow my traffic, because I wanted to learn from my early users — I didn't want a ton of traffic [early on].  I wanted to have users that I would be able to dialogue with, and start to built a community of people who were committed to Able Grape, and then learn from that.  There's a lot of things that have evolved during that time.  But now, I'm really started to step up the effort to spread the word.  I have a lot of work to do to get the word out.

NM: So, is Able Grape now ready for prime time?

DC: It is fully functional [right now].  I've advertised it as a beta, since there's a lot more features I want to add.  But what's here works.  My primary goal was to be better than Google for wine-related queries, and I would say that it's there.  You can never look at just one query; you have to look a broad range of queries.  There's always going to be some queries where Google will be better.  But I think if you tried — in fact, I know, if you tried — a hundred random queries, [Able Grape] would be, on average, quite a bit better than Google.  Even though there's a lot of things I'd like to improve — there's a still some rough edges and a lot of features that people have asked for that I'm working on building — I would say that, yes, it's ready for prime time.

And not only ready, but willing and able!  Doug invites users to register as a way to customize their wine-search experience with personal preferences and to be informed of upcoming features and improvements.  To have a go at the internet's first wine search engine, visit Able Grape. 

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