Our history

Rich Parker, our founder, has been developing software in various languages and industries since 1981. See the founder's page for more info on him. Suffice it to say, for this page, that he came up with a new way of processing and storing data in 1993, and couldn't find the right use for it.

Back in 2001, our founder decided to put up a website for a charitable group. He encountered a host of challenges getting his site visible to other users: which search engines should he use, how to optimize, how to advertise? It seemed like there was a 'black hole' out there aimed at webmasters' wallets.

Then came the mysteries: How did Google rank pages, and why? No matter how sophisticated the query, it always seemed like there were a million results between the 'top' and what was sought. That just didn't seem right. Same question for Yahoo, Lycos, MSN... most of the search engines seemed to focus on words instead of meanings.

The quest: This led Rich to get back into "meta-data" and work on a new formula that would derive meanings, and store those meanings. Success! However, this would require a lot of servers, and a lot of money to put together. This is what is meant by "Final VariSearch": a goal we are working hard towards every day. (see the future page for more on that.

The sub-quest: To develop this engine and put it to use, Rich needed a model to bring business owners together, both as advertisers and as ad publishers.

This is the basis of Varisearch LLC: We have developed (and are still developing) tools and services to help webmasters get their sites seen on the current search and ad systems.

In 2001, varisearch.com was created as a 'pilot directory' site. This was done both to learn PHP, and see which promotion systems worked, and how they worked.

In 2002, Rich decided to develop a "Traffic Exchange" that would provide a way for entrepreneurs to set up their own ad business. Originally, this was going to be a "one-off" package that would help bring in people and ideas about promoting web-oriented products and services to each other. Ultimately, several early members prevailed upon Rich to make the software itself available. This was the foundation of VS-TrEx, our traffic exchange software. The 'alpha site' still exists at http://trex.varisearch.com.

Later the same year, a few early customers of the VS-TrEx software started talking about connecting their systems together, and voila! VS-TEN was born. VS-TEN is our Traffic Exchange Network, and it allows traffic exchanges to 'cross surf'. This helps each exchange to get promoted on the other exchanges, helping each business to grow. In a typical day, 150,000 page views cross the network, and it is still growing.

With all these eyes, there had to be a way to reach them profitably. In 2005, VariSearch (at the time, a Florida-based company) came out with an ad system called "The Link Ring". Originally, The Link Ring was the official "commercial site" for VS-TEN, allowing non-traffic-exchange owners to get sites onto the network, but it soon branched out into other media format, and started accepting publishers for various kinds of advertising.

Later in 2005, we decided to stick our toe into 'contextual link advertising'. However, every time we got a publisher set up, the publisher would want to change something, so the system (originally "Links in Context") went idle.

During 2005 through 2007, we sold over 120 copies of VS-TrEx, and got over 270 new ideas for either similar products (see Banner Elevator or Twister rotator for examples of this.) While several products got started, each ended up being a custom job, meaning that there was a lot of service put into each product.

In 2007 and early 2008, our founder had some family issues that required him to move back to Pennsylvania, which also crippled development. We are now re-starting development on several projects, and decided to incorporate. So, as of June, 2008, Varisearch LLC is a Pennyslvania-based LLC.

During this semi-hiatus, the founder realized that he could use an invention from 1993, called a 'flex-form' to make website design easier, and to make the product lines more consistant. This website is the first example of "skeleton", which is a web-based "flex-form". We hope you will enjoy both the quality and similarity available in our product line, as we expand it throughout 2008 and 2009.