Snap.com Selects Netli to Accelerate Award-Winning Web 2.0 Search Engine

WebKnowHow
Thursday, December 14, 2006; 02:44 AM

Netli, a fast growing global service provider for accelerating applications and content over the Internet, announced that Perfect Market Technologies, Inc., operator of Snap.com, has selected Netli to guarantee a fast, responsive user experience for its Web 2.0-based search engine. With Netli, Snap.com has achieved an average 59 percent speed improvement on its homepage and a 30 to 50 percent speed improvement on its search results pages, even in the face of network congestion, traffic spikes, and rapid company growth. With Netli, Snap.com has ensured a user experience that encourages adoption and longer search sessions, thus improving the company’s ability to generate advertising revenue. 

Snap.com, a next-generation search engine providing users with a more efficient and more visual way to obtain, view, and interact with search results, was built using AJAX, a Web 2.0 technology that dramatically increases the rate of transactions and traffic flowing between the user and the data center, which can lead to performance degradation and scalability challenges. Netli offers the only managed service that accelerates web applications and content using a purpose-built bi-nodal network, and only Netli accelerates rich Internet applications such as AJAX, Flex and Web Services bi-directionally, ensuring a desktop-like experience that is fundamental to the Web 2.0 paradigm.

“Netli was deployed over a weekend and required no changes to our application or infrastructure,” said Mike Agostino, CTO of Snap.com. “The results were immediate, with Netli delivering the performance we require to fuel broad user adoption, encourage longer session times, promote long-term customer loyalty, and generate greater advertising revenue with our cost-per-action advertising model. And, as important, Netli will automatically scale to meet our expected rapid growth curve.”

In the old search paradigm, clicking on the search button or a search result caused a single burst of bi-directional traffic between the user and data center. A short delay was expected and tolerated. But Snap.com provides a more fluid browsing experience by pre-loading images of target websites and dynamically suggesting keywords and phrases as a user inputs a search term. These capabilities, which make searching faster and more efficient, require constant Internet traffic to flow between the user and Snap.com. But any significant delay in updating the screen quickly causes user frustration and ruins the Web 2.0 search experience.

“The phenomenal user benefits of Web 2.0 come at a steep performance price in the data center, and companies planning to role out global applications must be prepared to optimize the unique attributes of Web 2.0 traffic,” said Willie M. Tejada, senior vice president of marketing and business development at Netli. “Snap.com is an innovative application that now leverages Netli’s platform for providing on-demand performance and scale for Web 2.0 applications ensuring their users receive desktop-like experience.”

The NetliOne Platform serves as the foundation for the Netli Application Delivery Network (ADN) suite of services: NetLightning, NetliOffload, NetliContinuity, NetliView, NetliDRM, and Netli Accelerated SSL Delivery. NetLightning securely accelerates dynamic, enterprise Web applications to assure LAN-like response times worldwide without requiring application modifications. With zero cache warming and management required, NetliOffload offloads static content delivery to shift bandwidth, computing, and storage requirements from the enterprise data center to the on-demand Netli network infrastructure. NetliContinuity provides global traffic management to ensure optimal performance and availability across data centers. NetliView continuously monitors business-critical, Netli-optimized applications to provide visibility into application response time and health. NetliDRM provides accelerated access to and control over high-value digital assets. Netli Accelerated SSL Delivery ensures LAN-like response times worldwide for secure traffic.