The demand for Search in a
Social Network
Andrew Page, and Des Traynor
National University of Ireland, Maynooth

Background
Bigulo was started by 2 programmers /
●
PhD students, with no outside funding.
To date, we have spent €0 on
advertising.
Bigulo was launched in September 2006
●
as a solution to an extremely common
problem with the Bebo network.
Real friends simply couldn't find each
●

Scenario
Oh you're on Bebo Too?
Yeah, I've been on it for ages
Really? Me too!
Cool, whats your username
de_stra124, actually I can't remember
Yeah, I can't remember mine either
Ha, I'll send you an invite, whats your email address

Scenario
“Whatever happened to all the
gang from my old job, I wish I had
their email addresses or something“

Our solution
We have created a Free form Google style search for the Bebo
network, which allows you to search by name, gender , age or
location

Popularity of Bigulo
Bigulo started in September 2006 with
●
approximately 100 users per day
Attempts to advertise in colleges were
●
mildly successful, however our primary
growth came from within Bebo
We used 2 tactics to market Bigulo within
●
Bebo

Marketing within a social
network
Our first strategy was to reward users for
●
mentioning Bigulo on their homepage.
Our reward was to place them on the
Bigulo Home page.
Since most Bebo users are enamoured
●
with their own page views, the chance to
increase your page views by being
featured on Bigulo was too hard to turn

Creating a Bebo User
Our second tactic was to create a character
●
called Bigulo! on the Bebo network
This proved wildly popular, and within days
●
Bigulo had hundreds of friends.
This large friends list allowed us to launch our
●
new features with a bang, by mailing all our
friends, who would in turn mail all their
friends.
Additionally, it provides us with a good
●
relationship with the users. We can test the
water for new features etc.

The effect in Bigulo popularity
Yesterday,
7,500 Users
Bigulo
Launched.
90 users

The Spread of the marketing
Because of how we grew our data set,
●
our initially popular was restricted to
Ireland.
Since January, thanks to word of mouth,
●
Bigulo has started growing worldwide

Bigulo Popularity
United
Kingdown 38%
Ireland 28%
United States
13%
Australia + NZ
10%
Other 11%

Technical Challenges
Our primary problems in building Bigulo
●
were technical.
Performing a rapid search across a
●
MySQL database of 5 million rows is
extremely difficult.
The problem gets tougher every day as
●
we continue to grow our dataset.
Add to this our increasing number of
●

Technical Challenges
Bigulo performs approximately 35,000 searches
●
per day. (We have performed 1.5 million searches
to date)
Each search is usually very not restricted
●
i.e. Find me all guys called John (returns 20,000
●
entries from a database of 5,000,000)
Our traffic comes in focussed spikes putting our
●
servers under heavy load (e.g. Lunch Time GMT
accounts for 40% of our page views)
The Bebo generation has a very low attention
●
span, the results have to be ready quickly, or they
will leave

Speed of Searches
Whilst Bigulo offers many Bebo related
●
features, search is by far our most popular.
We have fought endlessly with code to keep
●
our search time down.
Currently 95% of our searches are performed
●
within 0.2 seconds
Bigulo has gained many imitators since
●
launching
We believe that search speed and interface
●
simplicity are our main strengths, and the
reason we have maintained strong continuous

The future for Bigulo
Bebo has grown rapidly in Ireland and
●
the UK over the past year.
The future of Bigulo is unavoidably
●
connected with the popularity of Bebo
We are currently considering taking
●
investment to enable us to expand our
popularity in the U.K.

The future of Bigulo
Additionally there are many more
●
features on the whiteboard which we're
sure will be hugely popular.
More details about these closer to their
●
release date.
Until then, thanks for listening, please
●
spread the word :)

Thanks for your time
http://www.bigulo.com
“It's like Google, but just for Bebo“