A little thorn on Google’s side?

Tiny start-up rival to Google?
POTENTIAL SEEN IN GERMAN SEARCH FIRM
By Elise AckermanMercury News
Article Launched: 10/06/2007 06:45:43 AM PDT

It’s the nightmare of any Silicon Valley CEO: The thought that a smart kid in a messy garage in Silicon Valley is right now developing technology that will make his company’s products obsolete.

So should Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin be losing sleep about a tiny German company called Proximic?

While the notion may at first seem ridiculous, given Google’s strengths and cash hoard, computer scientists at some of Silicon Valley’s biggest Internet companies have been struck by the firm’s promising new search technology.

Although in this case, contrary to stereotype, the extremely powerful software code was actually developed by a 54-year-old German mathematician working in a spick-and-span office near the University of Munich.

Thomas Nitsche’s program matches Web pages with relevant advertising. That’s what Google’s AdSense network also does. But Nitsche and his 33-year-old partner, Philipp Pieper, chief executive of Proximic, believe they do it better. People who have played with their program say that seems to be true.

While Google looks at the words on a Web page, Proximic looks for patterns of characters. That means Proximic’s approach is completely language-independent, so it works as well with German and Chinese as it does with English.

In theory, this makes Proximic ideal for the random spew of user-generated content posted daily on blogs and social-networking sites around the Web, material that often gets the better of Google’s algorithms.

…A world microcomputer chess champion in 1984, Nitsche drew on that experience during the five years he spent writing Proximic’s matching engine. In programming a computer to play chess, Nitsche also learned, by necessity, to write very efficient programs. The computers he was using had only about 5 kilobytes of memory. He said Proximic’s core technology amounts to less than one megabyte of software code.

Nitsche and Pieper first met in 2001, at a party thrown by Pieper’s sister, Loretta Wurtenberger, founder of Webmiles, a travel-loyalty program that was acquired by Bertelsmann.

Here is the full story.