I’ll even try to account for it when other people use that gratuitous bit of punctuation, and so a statement from Wazap’s founder and CEO, Andreas Ruhrig, is going to have a short ellipsis.

“The launch in the U.S. is a particularly important step . . . as we are solidifying our position as a global player in the gaming sector,” said Ruhrig.  “With 250 million page views worldwide each month, we’re already operating at a very high level and our feature set has been very well-received by users.  With so much positive energy behind us, we’re now looking forward to continuing our upward trend in the enormously exciting U.S. market.”

Yet there’s still the question of whether Wazap has really entered said market.  A press release claims to have “announced today the launch” – the word “beta” is nowhere to be found – but Wazap’s U.S. site is marked as a beta version, and it requires that would-be users “Apply for Beta access.”  Hmph.  It’s hard to use or review a search engine when the engine doesn’t readily let you search.

I can at least say, based on Wazap’s success elsewhere, that the concept has promise.  Any interested onlookers might want to check back in a week or two to see if the search engine is fully launched in the U.S.

Wazap Coming To America?

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 ECP article comments on the conceptual approach that Wazap has taken:

Wazap’s success in the U.S. will probably come as more of a challenge, given the established presence of widely popular online gaming portals such as IGN, as well as others.

Of course, Wazap’s strategy may not be that of direct competition with IGN. In fact, searching for game titles within the engine may lead directly to articles hosted by the 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.

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Joe is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest ebusiness news.