Cazoodle: Building New Search Engines!

About Us

Building better search engines!

Cazoodle specializes in building new search engines. Our mission is to help users make their decisions more efficiently as when they're looking for apartments for rent, or deciding on which products to buy. In such situations, users often end up spending hours and hours checking on possibilities spread across dozens of websites. Cazoodle’s search engines aggregate information from thousands of online sources, creating a one stop-destination for users to quickly navigate through all their possible choices.

The underlying technology behind Cazoodle’s search engines was developed at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign by Dr. Kevin Chang and his research team. The technology can crawl and transform unstructured HTML content into structured databases, including content hidden in deep Web sources.

Cazoodle also offers its Data Factory service for other partner organizations for supporting their Web data-gathering needs. This service is successfully used by many major organizations, including the U.S. Army, the largest classifieds search engine in Brazil, a major comparison-shopping engine, and more.

Our team at Cazoodle is super-excited to launch search engines for new applications, as well as improve our current services. Let us know your comments!

Press Center

Press Releases

Cazoodle announces a new vertical search portal for vacation rentals

Cazoodle is pleased to announce the launch of its Vacation Rental vertical search destination at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. The service is powered by Cazoodle's revolutionary new "structured data extraction" technology. Cazoodle's Vacation Rental search service is your one-stop solution for vacation rentals, allowing you to find the most up to date information on deals for housing condos, apartments and bed & breakfast inns across the United States, from more than 2,500 online websites....

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Cazoodle makes it easy to find stuff on the Web and unveils its shopping search at DEMOfall 09

Shoppers no longer need to visit so many websites to find the electronics of their dreams. Cazoodle Shopping Search is the first and only organic shopping search service that simultaneously provides comprehensive as well as precise product information. The first launch is for consumer electronic products including laptop and desktop computers, digital cameras and camcorders, printers, televisions, mp3 players, etc.

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New apartment rental search engine offers thirty times more listings than current services, product launch at Web 2.0 Expo 2009

Apartment hunters can now find over thirty times more online rental apartment listings nationwide, using the new Cazoodle.com Apartment Search website. "The numbers for the San Francisco Bay Area provide a case in point," Stated by Cazoodle's CTO Govind Kabra. "Cazoodle.com's Apartment Search lists over 35,000 rental apartments in the San Francisco Bay Area," he continues, adding, "By contrast, for the same area, other rental search services such as Rent.com, Apartments.com, MyNewPlace.com and ApartmentSearch.com together offer less than a thousand rental apartment listings." Other locations show similar differences.

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For Press Inquries Please Contact:

  • Cazoodle, Inc
  • Phone: (312) 588-6348
  • Email: contact@cazoodle.com
  • Business Hours: Mon - Fri 9 am - 6 pm Central Time

Our Team

Our Team

Cazoodle was founded by Dr. Kevin Chang and his research team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Our team is full of young, energetic engineers and seasoned business executives who are all excited to build new search engines -- and having fun along the way!

Kevin C.C. Chang

Dr. Kevin C.C. Chang

Founder and CEO

Chang is also an Associate Professor in Computer Science at UIUC, where he joined the faculty in 2000 with a dream of making things happen through research and through students. There, he has been working with students in large-scale information access -- i.e., information on the Internet-- where the MetaQuerier project deals with large-scale information integration over the "deep Web," and the WISDM project develops data-aware search over the "surface Web."

He received a B.S. from National Taiwan University and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. He was the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award in 2002, an NCSA Faculty Fellow Award in 2003, IBM Faculty Awards in 2004 and 2005, and was named an Excellent Teacher at UIUC in 2001 and 2004. He has served on the program committees of major data management and Web search conferences, including SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, WWW, AAAI, CIKM, and ICDM.

Kimathi Marangu

Kimathi Marangu

Marketing Executive

Kimathi Marangu is a recognized expert in loyalty marketing, affiliate marketing and e-commerce. Kimathi was the co-founder of Mall Networks, the leading provider of merchant-funded rewards. Prior to that, Kimathi grew Apple's affiliate program into one of the largest in the industry. He also established Apple's U.S. search and comparison shopping partnerships with Google, Yahoo! Shopping, Shopzilla, Overture, Shopping.com and PriceGrabber. He has been quoted by Fox Business News, USA Today, BusinessWeek.com, New York Newsday, Red Herring and others. Kimathi obtained his A.B. in Economics from Vassar College and his M.B.A. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Paul Krappman

Paul Krappman

Business Development Executive

Paul Krappman has more than 20 years of start-up, turn-around and strategy development experience with software and technology companies. Mr. Krappman is a founding partner of Roatan Partners, LLC, an advisory services firm that helps develop growth strategies for technology and software start-up businesses and a Co-Founder of TruAssurance, Inc., a web archival internet service (SaaS) company. Earlier, he was the President of ShipNow, a logistics software company, which got acquired by Kewill Solutions. Paul obtained his BA from Marquette University.

Yuping

Yuping Tseng

Co-founder and CDO

Yuping Tseng also graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with an M.S. degree. He previously attended National Chiao Tung University for his undergraduate study. He has over 10 years of software development experience. He previously worked at TSMC, but figured his brains weren’t wired for silicon wafers. So he moved to UIUC for his M.S. studies. He then worked at the UIUC Diglib Lab for five years before he joining the forces to start Cazoodle and lead its Taiwan office.

Quoc

Quoc Le

Co-founder and Chief Engineer

Quoc Le also graduated UIUC with an M.S. degree. He also studied in a Ph.D. program at UIUC before diving into Cazoodle along with his peers. He previously studied at Hanoi University for his undergraduate studies. Besides using his skills to drive Cazoodle and lead the company’s office in Vietnam , he also enjoys teaching the next generation of bright engineers at Hanoi University.

Advisors

Advisors

Our company is fortunate to have been originated at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Our origins give us the opportunity to be steered by an excellent team of advisors.

Rob Schultz

Rob Schultz

Rob Schultz is a Senior Director of IllinoisVENTURES and a Partner of the Illinois Emerging Technologies Fund. Rob currently serves on numerous corporate boards including Fluensee, RiverGlass, ShareThis, Tekion and Caterva. Rob is the Founder and former CEO of DigitalWork, Inc., leading the company through its IPO. Prior to DigitalWork, Rob was the President of Nequity, a subsidiary of Signet Bank that was acquired in 1997. Prior to his employment at Nequity, Rob was a consultant with McKinsey and Company and Deloitte and Touche.

Tim Hoerr

Tim Hoerr

Tim Hoerr is a seasoned business executive with over 25 years of experience spanning a variety of industries. Tim is the founder and CEO of Serra Ventures, a leading venture capital firm catering to early-stage and emerging technology companies. He also serves a number of high-tech, start-up companies, including Cbana Labs, ImmuVen, Aptimmune Biologics and Diagnostic Photonics. He previously served as Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of iCyt, a rapidly growing bioscience technology firm located in the University of Illinois Research Park, Champaign, Illinois. iCyt was acquired by Sony Corporation in late 2009.

Harlee Sorkin

Harlee Sorkin

Harlee Sorkin is the Founder and Principal of Mentor Management, LLC. He is currently serving as Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the incubation center of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a Director at Busey Wealth Management, Inc. (NASDAQ: BUSE), an Advisor to the Technology Entrepreneur Center at the University of Illinois College of Engineering, and an Advisor to VasSol, Inc., a Chicago, IL medical imaging company. Harlee also serves as a mentor at the Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at Washington University. in St. Louis. Previous roles include VP of Marketing for Degussa BioActives and VP & COO at Traco Labs, Inc., a manufacturer of nutritional ingredients.

Contact us to learn more

Contact us for more information

  • Voicemail: +1-312-588-6348
  • Email: contact [at] cazoodle.com

Or simply send an inquiry below.

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