Video Game Search Engine Eyes U.S. Launch

In a new round of capital funding, Wazap has received an additional $7.9 million as part of its effort to expand its presence into the United States. Currently, the gaming search engine is only available in the Chinese, Japanese, and German languages, respectively.

Wazap is scheduled to launch in the United States in February. Partech International heads up the second round of funding, with additional support from Wellington Partners. Wellington contributed $4 million in capital to Wazap in the company's initial monetary campaign. Vertical and niche searches are becoming all the rage, and with the video game industry ripe for takeoff in 2007, the timing for a U.S. launch of the gaming search engine couldn't be better. An IGN portal. The nuance here is that Wazap is an aggregation resource, not a content provider in and of itself. So instead of going to IGN to get a review of a game, then navigating over to GameFAQs to get a look at the walkthrough and cheats, users will instead be able to search for a particular game and get the entire lowdown within a SERP page, cutting down the research time. Well, this is the concept that Wazap is banking on, anyway. It'll be interested to see what kind of success and/or fanfare the U.S. launch is met with next month. Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl Joe is a staff writer for latest ebusiness news.