Leave the surfing to the pros, please

Like any competent Information Age entrepreneur, Ed Simcox considered himself an accomplished Web surfer. Until the day he needed to buy a new printer, that is.

The chief executive of Indianapolis-based Saurian Technologies wanted an industrial-quality, high-speed Bell & Howell printer, and he’d already spent an hour and a half searching the Web for a reasonable price, “with no results,” he admits.

Then, as a last-ditch effort, he called on a professional. Simcox phoned iNetNow.com a Chatsworth, Calif., startup that searches the Internet for you. Ten minutes later, an iNetNow “surfer” got back to him with a price $400 less than his distributor’s best quote.

“It just blew my mind,” says Simcox, who now says he feels “less than adequate” when conducting a Web search. “A year ago, I knew where the best search engines were, but now I’m not so sure anymore.”

Has it really come to this? Is searching the Internet becoming a profession, like practicing law or medicine?

iNetNow is counting on it. This week the company informally rolls out its operator-assisted surfing service, with an official launch pegged for this summer. Some details still need to be worked out, including pricing – the company is considering charging anywhere between 49 cents and 99 cents a minute – as well as some of the fine print on its service packages.

But the concept itself is about as polished as it gets.

I know because iNetNow invited me to evaluate the service as a beta tester last week. Determined to stump their surfers, I thought up three of the most difficult queries that I could and then called its toll-free number. Here’s what happened:

The task: For days, I had been trying to buy a new electric razor online. The model I wanted had a list price of $199, but I’d seen it for as little as $159. Trouble is, the merchandise wasn’t in stock. I asked surfer Jared Vallejo if he could do better.

The result: Within thirty seconds, iNetNow had pulled up the same $159 quote that it took me hours to find. But alas, the retailer was out of product. Vallejo asked for more time, and about 20 minutes later he e-mailed me with the information of a vendor who had the right model in stock – for $149.

My take: iNetNow saved me $50 and performed far better than online search services such as AskJeeves, which appear to refer users to a preferred set of overpriced e-stores. For a search with very specific parameters, they were very fast. But what happens when I take away that specificity?

The task: Find the best price on a book written by Max Boot, a friend who I interned with at the Los Angeles Times. I didn’t offer the title of the book, but I gave his last known employer.

The result: The easy part – finding the title of the book (“Out of Order”) – took less than thirty seconds. But getting around the hardcover list price of $18 would have burned a lot of my time. iNetNow used bookfinder.com to track down a used copy for $4.49 or a new copy on BarnesandNoble.com for $4.98.

My take: iNetNow saved me about $13 in less than a minute. Even though my search terms were vague, it didn’t seem to faze my surfer in the least. Time to muddle things up a little more …

The task: Track down an old college friend, Steve Sebelius, who writes for a newspaper “somewhere west of the Rockies.”

The result: Although iNetNow misspelled his name at first, the search took less than two minutes. My surfer determined that Sebelius is now a political columnist at the Las Vegas Review-Journal in a fraction of the time it would have taken me.

My take: These guys are good.

The appeal of an Internet concierge to frequent travelers is obvious. There’s not much that an iNetNow surfer can’t do for you, it would seem. Sure, surfing the Web on your own can be fun, but when you’re in a hurry – particularly when speeding down a highway at 80 miles an hour – a professional Web browser could come in handy.

Lenny Young, the president of iNetNow, says that in the Internet Age, people have forgotten the importance of human interaction. By combining the skills of a real person with a lot of proprietary search software, he hopes to meet travelers’ insatiable appetite for information, and to deliver it almost instantaneously.

“I think about the irony of iNetNow a lot,” he confesses. “That in order to get what we want from the Internet, we have to ask a person for help. But maybe that’s one of the assumptions of the Internet that’s wrong. People think that computers should be able to do everything for you, but they can’t.”

I couldn’t agree more. If computers could replace people, then travel agents would have done a disappearing act a long time ago. But do we really need professional Web surfers? As well as iNetNow works, I’d like to think that there’s something wrong with the search engines and Web browsers, not the people using them. While iNetNow may have discovered an untapped market in serving busy travelers, it could end up making much more by designing a smarter search program.

Christopher Elliott is the author of Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles, and Shady Deals. Critics have called it “eye-opening” and “inspiring” — it’ll “grab your attention and won’t let go.” Order your copy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes.

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