Its funny how often successful products and services are just obvious modifications of pre-existing ones. Correct me if Im wrong but this sounds like the Google of electronic parts.
Thats not to downplay the genius or ingenuity of these companies by any means--in fact, if anything, its a compliment to their observational skills. Still, funny how it tends to be the obvious ideas which prove the most successful. Bravo
Its described as a consolidated search engine so i dont think its fair to say that its "nothing" like Google. Different problems though, you're absolutely right. I suppose I was generalizing but I think you see my point.
In terms of the product itself, "Kayak of electronic parts" might be a better description.
In terms of technology, the first thing we did was actually take a Google-like approach to the part search problem. For example, before we started working on Octopart, you had to use separate search boxes to search part numbers and descriptions. In order to implement search across multiple fields simultaneously we abandoned mysql in favor of a full-text search engine. So, there's probably more overlap with Google search than you would expect looking at our search results.
