This is certainly a great product, and the fact that the founders are in fact "scratching an itch" gives me confidence that they'll continue to do fine on the t

This is certainly a great product, and the fact that the founders are in fact "scratching an itch" gives me confidence that they'll continue to do fine on the tech side of things. I do wonder, however, what the business model is here. My hope is that the major parts vendors will recognize that Octopart is a good thing for them, and will play ball--both on the technical/database integration front, and, hopefully in terms of monetizing the product. Because it really is a great product. One technical quibble, though: Octopart could improve its result quality a good bit by incorporating some semantic analysis. An example: a search for "blue led 3mm leaded" returns as its first result an SMD (i.e. non-leaded) part. What's going on here? It's matching the phrase "Leaded Process Compatible: No;" with a bit of not-terribly-deep semantic matching (leveraging the fact that part specs speak a relatively contrived and regularized language) it should be possible to recognize that "Leaded Process Compatible: No" is not a match for leaded. Quibbles aside, I'm looking forward to watching Octopart improve, and, hopefully, succeed. We all know the competition sucks, after all.