As TV and Web merge, Clicker helps find what you want to watch

Back in the 1950s, with three new TV networks and no good way to figure out what to watch, bite-size TV Guide magazine became a national fixture on coffee tables. Cut to 2009. Former Ask.com CEO Jim Lanzone was searching for the next great idea. Television had migrated to the Web in a big way. Why not offer a digital guide, where TV fans could search for their favorites? Lanzone's Clicker, a year old next week, has quietly amassed a database of more than 1 million TV episodes and 2 million monthly visitors. "We were looking at the next 50 years of television, and how it was merging with the Internet," says Lanzone, Clicker's CEO and co-founder. "How would you navigate all of that? A daily calendar wouldn't cut it anymore, which is what programming guides were in the previous 50 years. ... It would need to be a lot more like a search engine." TV listing sites on the Web are easy to find. Scroll through TV sites from Yahoo, AOL and MSN, and you can easily find listings and synopses on the latest episode of Fox's megahit Glee, for instance. But Clicker goes much deeper. It displays the prime-time showing, plus the five most recent episodes in rotation on the Hulu website, as well as which Glee episodes are available for viewing via iTunes and Amazon. Clicker also does a good job of searching beyond TV to webisodes you may not be aware of.