For the last few years Gross has been hanging his hat at Idealab, a true hotbed of business ideas. Idealab’s ambitions even venture into harnessing solar energy. Snap.com is an offshoot of Idealab and is noteworthy for the exceptional contextual search features it provides. Searches with Snap.com give in-window previews of contextual ads. It allows you to glimpse a website in question before actually have to click and visit it. This innovation provides convenience to the potential visitor, who may get a better idea of what’s in store before clicking on an ad. The mouse-over display also saves the advertiser money, improves cost per acquisition, and lowers the visitors’ abandonment rate by minimizing the number of needless clicks from uninterested visitors.

Perhaps visual search displays for are too far ahead of its time. Leading search engines don’t want more informed and pickier searchers clicking fewer ads, but Gross’s career path is replete with successfully zigging while others zag. It might take some happy accident of his or an innovation of another company to marry well into Snap’s added contextual platform before Snap’s functionality goes from a cool alternative to an industry staple. I think Bill Gross banks on this. Snap.com has also spawned Big.com, a search tool that employs the simplest concept that could ever be thought up, yet no one really did until Big.com: that’s a search engine with giant font. People who like Big.com include seniors, the vision impaired and me. It’s terrific, almost shocking to behold. The layout of Big.com is beautiful once you figure out what you’re looking at. Like any standard search engine, you’ll get results by entering keywords into a search bar.

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