An Interview with the Creator of Wine Search Engine Able Grape

A wine snob.  A tech geek.  An unlikely pair, perhaps.  But in engineer-cum-wine-enthusiast Doug Cook, they're actually one and the same.  Fueled by his talents and background in web search technology, and steered by his knowledge and passion for wine, Cook has succeeded in his ambition to create the internet's first search engine dedicated to the world of wine: Able Grape.  Though I'd first met the technologist at the 2008 Wine Bloggers Conference in Sonoma, California, it wasn't until some time later later that I sat down with him in the streamlined and hip interior of San Francisco's CAV Wine Bar to learn more about the workings, usage, and significance of this new online tool.  What I learned was not only how powerful, concise, and robust Able Grape is, but how feature-rich and easy it is to use for enophiles and neophytes alike.

NM: In your own words, tell me: what is Able Grape?

DC: The short answer would be that Able Grape is Google for wine geeks.  My goal is to replace Google as the search engine of choice for anyone who's a professional in the wine trade or a serious, passionate wine consumer.  I want it to be the first stop for people who are looking for trustworthy wine information on the internet.

NM: Now let me play devil's advocate: why do you feel it necessary to create a search engine specifically geared towards what amounts to a niche audience?  Is there something you're providing through Able Grape which you feel that Google cannot or will not address?

DC: Yes.  As to why I felt it necessary, I'll answer that by telling you why I built Able Grape in the first place.  My background is originally in search technology.  My previous gig was as engineer and eventually as Vice President of Engineering at a company called Inktomi.  We were around a couple of years before Google, building search engines.  At one point, we were building most of the search engines on the internet; we were powering AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo —all three at the same time, for a while.  Inktomi eventually got bought by Yahoo.  About a year after that happened, I decided it was time for me to take a break: I'd been working on search engines for a long time and wanted to get away from the big company experience and work on other things that I'm passionate about.  I wasn't sure if that would be wine, but certainly wine was a big passion of mine.  I'd taken many wine classes; I'd been a pretty serious wine geek for a long time.

After I quit, I suddenly went from working my butt off all the time, to having all this [free] time, and I didn't know what to do with it.  So, I thought, "Okay, let's do something hard" and went to get a professional certification in wine, initially just for fun.  I got the diploma with the WSET [Wine and Spirit Education Trust].  While I was studying for that, I would always be trying to look things up on the internet, and [often got into situations where] I'd say [something like] "Okay, what is this grape variety really like?"  I look at one book and it says one thing; I look at another book and it says another thing; I look online and I see all kinds of different things.  I never knew really what to trust.  It was really hard to find geeky, trustworthy, in-depth content [on wine], especially using Google or Yahoo.  Trying to find official sources of information, like for a particular appellation, I'd try to find production regulations — "how many hectolitres per hectare is Alsace Grand Cru supposed to be?"  If you look in a book, it might be right, but then the law may just have been changed.  If you look online, you might find a bunch of different numbers but you never know which one to trust because there's a lot of consumer sites and there's a lot of sites that are out of date.  I spent a lot of time trying to dig through the content that's on the internet, trying to find which sites were really trustworthy, which ones were official sources of information for a particular wine region— trying to find good information.  There's tons of retail content, tons of consumer content, and tons of commercial content where[by] people are just trying to make money on Google and Yahoo by picking up traffic.  Digging through that, sometimes you're searching through 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 pages of results — 50 pages down in the results — before you find the official source of information on the [search] query that you're looking for.  And in some cases, some of these things are not in Google at all; they're just not there.  For example, the Institut National des Appellations d'Origin (the INAO) that has all the laws for every single appellation in France — their website is not in Google!

NM: What do you attribute that to?

DC: Well, the reason for that is that the [INAO] website is marked "don't crawl me" with a file that says "search engines: go away."  So, you cannot find that content on Google.  And there's a lot of sites like that; there's a lot of sites whose structure is set up so that they're not search engine friendly.  Some of the best wine sites in the world are that way.

NM: So, early on you identified problems with the way Google and Yahoo were — or were not, in many cases — indexing wine websites.  How did that evolve into this full-scale endeavor?

DC: Well, it started as a bookmark list.  I wasn't originally thinking I was going to make a search engine.  I was making a list of really authoritative, useful, in-depth wine sites for myself, as I was digging around and studying for my diploma exam.  By the end, I think I had about 500 really great wine websites, and I thought, "Oh, what the heck, maybe I'll make a little website of [links from] my list of good wine sites."  And unfortunately, or fortunately, I thought maybe I would just download an open-source search engine and see what it would be like if I tried to make a little search engine to search these [wine] sites.  So, I did.  I downloaded this open-source search engine called Nutch, started playing with it, and bit by bit, I started thinking, "Well, you know what?  If I just rewrite this bit here, I could make it work better for wine-related queries; and if I just change that bit there, I could make it even better in this other way."  So, I started tinkering.  I really wanted to make something that was uniquely useful, so I began to think about how I could completely rebuild this search-engine that I'd started with, make it wine-specific, and make it do things that you simply couldn't do with Google.  I spent a lot of time thinking about how people search for wine information, and a lot of time thinking how search engines work and how a general-purpose search engine doesn't always give you the best results for wine-related queries.  Eventually, I'd more or less re-written huge chunks of this search engine to do wine-specific things.  At the same time, I took the list of 500 sites that I started with and kept growing it, and started building software to go out and find every producer in the world, every organization, every publication (consumer, trade, scientific), every academic resource, and the best wine blogs — all in every language in the world of wine.  At this point, there's about 40,000 websites in the [Able Grape] index, and about 15 million pages of information.

NM: This is all quite complex and comprehensive.  But even though it's entirely focused on wine, aren't you in essence reinventing the wheel?  What is it that Able Grape offers that a larger, all-encompassing search engine in widespread use, like Google, does not?

DC: It really comes down to this: if you do one thing, and you really focus on it and specialize, you can do it really well.  Google is a general-purpose search engine.  Their policy is one of inclusion; they include pretty much everything.  There's all kinds of retail content in there — if you look up any wine, 99% of the content is retailers trying to sell you that wine.  And the retailers are much more savvy about search-engine optimization, more so than the producers who have the best information about the wines they make.  Sometimes finding a producer's own information can be like finding a needle in a haystack.  Similarly, there's a lot of people who are trying to make money by gathering web traffic, and other people who are putting up websites with not necessarily high-quality information, in some cases downright garbage.  Then there's this sort of this gray area of sites that may have 'okay' information, but maybe it's not very deep or trustworthy.  You never know what you're going to get with these sites.  So, one of the things I wanted to do is select everything editorially, so that I knew I'd only be getting high-quality wine-related sites — no retail, no commercial garbage.  And also, every single site is categorized, so that you know which sites are producers, which sites are importers, which are organizations, and which are publications and what sort of publications they are.  And then, when you're looking for information, you can instantly filter for the kind of information want.

[One stark reality that renders in high relief the difference between Able Grape and other large-scale, general purpose search engines is that a considerable number of wine-related websites which contain high-quality information are actually in the language native to their country of origin and lack an English version.  These pages would more than likely be completely overlooked by a search engine like Google.  Doug identified the necessity of including these non-English sites in Able Grape's master index, in the interest of maintaining the search engine's high standard of quality and comprehensiveness in the gathering and referencing of online wine resources.]

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.