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Search Beyond Google
An anonymous reader writes: "'Search Beyond Google', the cover story of the March issue of Technology Review, is one of the few current Google stories that discusses whether their technology can stay ahead of the competition in the months to come."
They key for google providing relevancy is certainly eliminating "search engine spam". Almost everything that comes up on the first page for most things I search for is a referral program selling either something I'm looking for information about, or selling something completely different.
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Google has had the last few years virtually unchallenged as the #1 search engine, because nobody has yet come out with anything that's better than PageRank.
But, five years is a long time to sit on an innovation without making it better. It gives the competition time to catch up. Furthermore, since PageRank doesn't seem to have seriously changed much, it's actually slipped backwards a bit as more and more people have figured out how to "beat the system" by posting nonsense sites with links to the site they want on top. Google's clearly trying to fight this, but that's an uphill battle.
Meanwhile, Yahoo now owns three distinct web-crawl based search engines, AltaVista, AllTheWeb, and Inktomi. They also own Overture, which begain life as GoTo.com who was the first to associate real search results with targetted ads. Put all these pieces together. Yahoo also has the original mega-directory site, which Google tries to duplicate by presenting the Open Directory Project on their site. In short, Yahoo's got all the resources to launch a brand with everything that Google has going for it... and when you look at AltaVista and AllTheWeb they feel quite a bit like Google already. Clearly, Yahoo's gearing up to issue a challenge to Google.
It really seems like Yahoo is making sure they have all the tech in place right now. When they're sure that they're better to Google, I fully expect to see a marketing campaign claiming that and inviting people to do head-to-head searches.
Google, as it stands now, is going to look pale in such showdowns. They've got to seriously modify PageRank so that the link spammers get downranked before Yahoo issues that challenge, or else Yahoo could reclaim the search market under it's "Google-killer" product line, and then direct people back to the original Yahoo site for their other portal needs.
Hopefully google will not go public anytime soon like they were talking about earlier. I fear that this would stifle their innovation and bring it closer to some of the other failed portals.. ie more ads in an attempt to satisfy investors.
I think it is a good idea for other search engines to step up to the plate and challenge google. It stops them from beoming complacent and spurs innovation from a desire to be #1.
I see no reason why the cycle cannot repeat. In fact, the cycle may be much like the semiconductor memory business, which has seen boom-bust cycles every few years since the early 70's. Sometimes a name will ride out for many cycles, but usually the company (and as necessary the technology) behind the name changes radically.
...maintain their technological lead, goodwill toward them will give them some breathing room. I continued to use Altavista for quite a long time after Google came out. It was what I was familiar with, I liked it, and it worked. Why switch? Eventually, I realized that Google had keen "read your mind" powers and finally switched. :-)
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Every couple months it's "Can Google stay ahead of new competitor x?" And so far, everytime, the answer has been yes. People shift from search engines quickly when they no longer work, and people are still heading to Google.
It seems like Google is starting to admit that they've hit a wall at improving their search technology, so they're starting to expand into other portal areas to anchor themselves down the same way Yahoo did when their directory-search model hit the wall.
But Yahoo seems to be investing in several of the surviving web crawlers from the early days. Clearly, they see Google's hold on the title as the #1 search engine as something they might be able to take back.
Enough branding studies have shown that it's very very hard to knock someone off their post once they seize a certain mindshare - e.g. Coke, Windows(grin), and now Google.
So, irrespective of the technical competence, or otherwise of Google, it is going to be around and the leader, for a long time to come. P.S. My favorite missing google feature: search for bittorrent files
Google has been successful due to original thinking. It needs to ride its wave of reputation now rather than later in order to snatch up some of the finest minds to stay on top of this industry that is all about originality and fresh ideas. They seem to be on the right track by providing the work environment that they do.
But no more stuff like that Friendster wannabe site.
Exactly. When Google falls behind, you'll know it because you'll be using something else. This kind of "Entity XXXXXXX may suffer setback YYYYYYY any day now" story isn't reporting at all, it's speculation and ghost stories.
.....in that everyone uses it, and everyone HAS used it for the past five years, or longer. People trust it, and that is something that just doesn't vanish. Plus, they HAVE done new things, such as google news.
Someone should invent a search engine with regular expression support. *sigh* A world with regexp-enabled search engines... That would be a wonderful world to live in.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Google's market position when they IPO has nothing to do with their technology. It has to do with their brand. "Googling" for something is the effective equivalent of going to get a Kleenex. Noone asked for a tissue. The market is going to be buying faith in the Google brand, and it's loyal userbase.
-- http://www.criticalassets.com
It would be the rebuttal to Google bombing... searchers could fight back by giving the crap a thumbs-down. Of course, then you would have the bombers voting down all the ligit sites. Dammit.
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The majority of users who use search engines are just end users anyways and appreciate the simplicity of Google's page design. I go to Yahoo, Altavista and Lycos and there's half a million links all over the place. I go to Google, and there's a nice clean page with the text box smack right in the middle.
Visual appeal still counts.
I don't really care who has the most advanced search capabilities. I use google because all the paid links appear off to the side in a different color.
Thats all I really want . . . to get my search result seperate from the commercially paid for product placements.
--Tsiangkun
Perhaps they're trying to be the central information aggregator? Many of their initiatives, webpage search, news search, usenet search, store searches... have to do with sifting through more information than humans can possibly handle. The Blogger acquisition and the friendster thing could be seen as peripheral endeavours that may yield a profit, but also might yield information on how to sift for relevance. e.g. handle blog relevance by studying interpersonal relationships of sites like friendster. After all, their web search is based on relationships between webpages of a sort. In that vein, Google Answers could be interpreted as an experiment to leverage the power of people in finding relevant results.
:)
Or I could be reading too much into what is otherwise standard corporate behaviour.