Andinia.com is the produce of many years of continuous research and exploration. It did not grow as a commercial venture in its origins but as an attempt to publish the vast amount of material related to travelling and adventure that we, those who created and now manage this website have had for years as a result of our trips and treks.
No one really expected the excellent reception that we had and still enjoy among the public; we just wanted to publish something but it forced us to change from a Mom & Pop Shop - like structure into something, somewhat more formal (but alas, no one has been seen wearing a tie in our ´office´, ever.)
Thus, we chartered our company, Andinia.com LLC in the State of Delaware, in the U.S.A., and we did so for a single reason: it was cheap.
Secondly, we picked the name ´Andinia´ for another simple reason: it is easy to remember and hence, easy to transform into an authentic brand.
But Andinia is more than just an attempt to make money: we publish a vast amount of non-profitable content as articles, reviews, etc. in addition to our search database. the site was created not only for commercial reasons: we see our work as mainly social and cultural. We are glad to make some money in the meantime, but the main reason for us to do this is to leave in the world something more than stock market valuations.
We started in this business with little business formation: we are scientists, sportsters and explorers and this is why we don´t think exactly as standard business persons.
True: we make some money, but we make other things as well. Just look at our directory, or the contents of our database: you will find commercial sites that pay us for our advertising services, but you will find always a bigger number of non-commercial articles, site registers, etc. and even the way in which all this information is presented is intended to provide our visitors with an equal and informed chance of choosing between commercial and non-commercial contents.
In this way we had and still ahve a degree of success that we did not expect (see our statistical information), and Andinia can be considered now as a self-sustainable brand that does not even depend on bein registered by other search engines in order to thrive, and belonging to the most-popular sites around the world (no pun intended, just look at the stats.)
And regarding this, we also have something to say because the way in which many websites have evolved from garage operations into big corporations have also shaped us: most of those search engines that in the beginning started as expressions of freedom now are becoming simple façades of big, standard-issue databases from which they take the information that we get when we perform searches, while attempting to present it as theirs.
Just run some tests of your own and take as an example Yahoo, AltaVista and AlltheWeb: these three search engines that began their life as very different things, catering to different audiences, now share a gigantic mother-of-all-databases. They are essentially the same thing now, with different web page designs, and this is becoming more and more common. If this has some resemblace to Big Brother, it is because there is such a resemblance.
This is disturbing; it may be legal, it may be a way to save costs, but it also makes our world less ample, for it limits our choices and turns news, information and ideas just into fodder. It also makes it a little bit more dangerous.
We still keep our own database and hand pick waht we put into it. in fact, our technology is fairly incompatible with these run-of-the-mil outsourced databases (they use a relational database model, while ours is purely documental).
Our first goal is to attain and retain the status of major contenders in the realm of travel, adventure and healthy activities infomation providers.
Our second goal is to never become a corporation, for as long as we don´t turn money into our main interest, we will enjoy other things such as true freedom and ironically, produce more money as well.
The quest for power always produces poverty; let´s not forget that.
Sincerely,
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