History

Founder Steve Mitchell developed Magis as a hobby in 1994. The World Wide Web was then in its infancy, and finding local information was complex, time consuming, and nearly impossible. The massive volume of information on the Internet is strength and a weakness. The Internet remains far too complex for users to find what they want, while for merchants it is virtually impossible to be found.

Mitchell came up with the idea and architecture for a city-relevant search engine that could be implemented in major cities around the globe. Searching for local information using popular search engines such as Yahoo! and AltaVista results in informational chaos. Through existing search engines there is no quick and surefire way to find a local business and place an order via its website or e-mail system. The World Wide Web needs to go local and search engines need to become find engines.

To transform his hobby into a worldwide city-sensitive find-engine, Mitchell turned to a successful entrepreneur named Guido Tremmaglia in 1999. Building on Mitchell's technical expertise and Tremmaglia's business acumen, the pair recruited a team of fifteen professionals and designed and assembled FinditinMontreal.com (see image below), a fully functional find engine for Montreal.

Users can now locate Montreal businesses much more quickly. As an example, a search for "Honda" via Google.com could yield up to 2,070,000 observations. A "Honda" search through FinditinMontreal.com will yield the twenty-six local dealerships.

In May of 2002, Magis introduced its national electronic business directory: FinditinCanada.Ca. The technology behind FinditinCanada.Ca has been recognized as the industry leader, and sees user satisfaction rates higher than any of the competition. The bottom line is that users find what they are looking for quickly and easily, and thus come back again and again.

FinditinCanada.Ca is already reaping huge success with over 2.3 million business listings shown every day to more than 25,000 people every day.