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Business Week On Desktop Search Economics
prostoalex writes "Business Week responds to the recent announcement by Yahoo! to join the ever-competitive desktop search field and asks whether any money will be made in giving away free utilities for desktop search. Apparently, beyond the intangible benefit of brand loyalty (which on the Internet probably doesn't amount to a whole lot), the only way to make money off the desktop search engines, as Business Week sees it, is to show related ads, which is bound to bring up some privacy issues."
What we need soon (if not now) is a personal search tool (PST) which searches/records all RFID-paired (paired for security) items in your surrounding, so that you can search anything (eg remote control, old text book sealed in one of the boxes) you have ever owned/paired.
Every time you bought a new item (anything RFID-ed), you pair it with this PST, which you wear like a watch, and its location is then recorded on a 3D grid of your designated surrounding (eg house mode, car mode). And this PST will constantly monitor/update its search index.
I think search is almost indispensable now, I almost always open up google.com when I tried to find my car key, and I feel as bad as those who wanted to carjack vehicles after playing too much GTA. I must be dreaming.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
They've missed the point. Google/Yahoo/whoever produce a good desktop search that you want to install. You install it. Then, when you need the search the web, what's the first place you're going to search with? Well, probably the one that's already running on your desktop. It's there and easy to access. That's how they make the money. You use their search engine and see their ads. No, you're not forced to use them, but most people will because it's what they want or they're lazy.
Seriously it's money that drives a product therefore if there is no cash incentive, the product will fail.
Brand loyalty (in my segment) will default to 'benevolent' google.
Cash isn't king to everyone, but programmers do have to eat (And corporations do have to make a profit else they get hammered off the street).
If the only reason companies like Yahoo!, Google, MS, etc. are entering the desktop search arena is in order to generate ad revenue, you can be sure I will never install one.
Ads related to my web searches? Ok. Ads based on what files are on my PC? No thanks, too big of a privacy concern for me.......
Consumer! I've noticed from your documents and spending habits you seem to be having an affair with your secretary!
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the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
Only a fool would run something on their computer that shows ads.....oh, wait, yeah, the web. Nevermind.
Since when has not making any money off of an idea ever stopped a .com. As we all saw during the .com explosion, most of these companies didn't have a business plan. So its no surprise the desktop version of the .com search engine has no way of making money -- yet.
Whenever I see another suggestion for a new place to shove in ads, I cringe. Ads have become one of the top reasons for me to stop using, ignore or actively disparage products. I even stopped reading the article half-way through because of the disgusting amount of bright, flashy ads in the margins.
It seems to me that Google is right, if want to keep a happy customer, stop advertising at every possibility!
Ok, that's enough ranting now.
** Sig-a-licious **
Does anyone know of a case where any company that said "We're giving out free computers" and actually did it? I sure do'nt! It's just one of those buisness ploys that morons always indulge in.
Lets see their marketing plan:
So they make something so that people can get things done _faster_.
Then they put advertisements in.
Then hope they'll forget they were trying to get things done and start clicking on those ads?
Makes no sense.
That's like hoping someone will leave during a tv show to get the product they see during a commercial.
The only money they'll make from advertising is views, not clicks. And we know this doesn't work.
2. ???? = show ads
I'm not trying to be a socialist with this thought, but most companies, particularly public ones who answer to their shareholders, are concerned with making a profit.
The economics of some of these tools are going to require companies to hijack our desktop with pop-up ads or 'relevant' ads.
However, the Open Source Software community could provide tools to do this without the profit motive.
Its kinda like the ole saying, 'some things only the government can/wants to do'; well some things only the OSS community can/wants to do.
It's not a question of money, but of presence. Once you have everyone using your software, you can look at sneaking in profit centers.
Google's a great example. They didn't start with AdSense - they added it once they were king.
Once your app is everywhere, you have all sorts of options. For example, if you don't want to sell ads, write another (commercial) program which expands the functionality of the original.
It's not always about the quick buck. Sometimes, it's about putting yourself in the proper position.
How is this even a viable industry, niche market, killer app, or whatever the hell it is that they seem to think it is.
Maybe they need to teach people how to use a computer... because I can't see this catering to anyone but the "I can't find my files even though Windows XP Retard Edition saves it to My\ Documents by default" crowd.
Can't someone just port grep -r to win32, maybe put a fancy GUI around it? Or is it suddenly innovation to reinvent simple tools unix already invented 30 years ago?
Anyone that actually needs a desktop search has entirely too much stuff on their computer, or just can't organize.
I guess if one wanted to search through their masses of pr0n or pirated movies it would be useful, but for the average computer user, it shouldn't be necessary. Most people will probably get it because it's the "new item on the market", and they think just because it's new, it must be better.
When used in this context, "intangible" doesn't mean "non-existent"... it means "hard to quantify". The difficulty of quantifying the benefit of a proposal should is not per se an argument against enacting the proposal.
For example, almost any investment in infrastructure has "intangible" benefits. When a government considers whether to build new roads to stimulate economic development of an area, it is very hard to pin down precisely what benefits will be derived in terms of commerce, consumption, quality of life, opportunity cost, etc... yet these kinds of decisions are made all the time, and for good reason: a persistent lack of infrastructural investment correlates strongly with diminished outcomes over the long term.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
It should bring up some security issues too.. If i trusted Microsoft to really handle security I would probably want to use their tool just for that reason. I mean I don't want something able to a) look at all my files and b) then communicate to the open net...
If any vendor does that, even MS, I wouldn't really want to use tool. Of course that will not stop Mom and Pop Netizen and all their scriptkids from using them...
http://www.hawknest.com/
VOLUME!
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Seems to me more like an effort to keep people using Google for web searches by making sure they turn to Goggle for local searches too, instead of the all-in-one MS tool that is going to be around eventually.
Basically, a pre-emptive strike to keep from loosing customers to Microsoft OS integration.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If anyone came out with a Win 98 desktop search tool. Yahoo! and Google search both need XP.
Yes Win 98. You laugh?
I'm stable, secure and have 5 machines on my network from a single cd. Mwah hah hah!
take off every zig
you know what you do
"...beyond the intangible benefit of brand loyalty (which on the Internet probably doesn't amount to a whole lot)..."
Brand loyalty doesn't amount to much on the Internet? I think that notion is very wrong. I believe that the more products/services one uses from a company - the more likely the avg person will stick with them. When a consumer trusts in a company, their loyalty usually follows. Sure, it isn't true for everyone, but trust/loyalty of the brand name is surely a very significant factor in any marketplace, the Internet being no exception.
The desktop search race is the great anti-climax of 2004-2005. Is anyone really putting these tools to productive use after downloading and playing with them?
Making money from desktop search may not be the issue.
If Microsoft was to create the only desktop search, Microsoft could leverage this to remove the need for Web-based search engines.
Microsoft wants a piece of everybody's pie. Well, the successful person's pie.
Who's to say that another Netscape-type incident couldn't occur within the search engine market?
Linux/Open Source/Anti Microsoft News
judicious use of wildcard matches over time (for example, *ads.osdn*) will remove most annoying crap from almost any site you visit.
I've been using DocYouMeant Hound http://myradus.com/. Mostly because I know the guy who wrote it, but I've found it to be quite useful.
First of all, grep has been available on windows for a very long time. However, what does grep have to do with any of these search engines?
Will grep find an instance of a word in a pdf document buried in gigabytes of data? What about a plain text document, who will find it faster, grep or GDS?
You do know these things are indexing your docs right?
Maybe you should invent a dumb search engine that gets rid of all that wasteful indexing nonsense does the following:
NoMoreNicksLeft's search engine (v 1.0)
1) Enter text you want to search
2) Enter "top" URL to start search from
3) Crawl whole internet looking for that string for as many links as can be reached from that "top" document.
Version 2.0 would replace steps 2 and 3 with
2) Randomly select a "top" URL, and visit every registered domain on the internet.
Does that make sense to you, because that's what you're suggesting.
- sigs are for wimps.
"Universal Search" sounds to me like the next step in the evolution towards 'epic.' A peer to peer WWW in which we all contribute to and help index. Desktop search is the first step. see: http://www.robinsloan.com/epic/
All will act as a webserver for everyone else. Don't think in terms of 'search' think in terms of 'index.'
Just that, the boy with the most toys wins since is the one with the most friends interested in the toys, just ask erp, hm, yahoo! heh
A desktop search engine will replace the file browser. This will give the company that gets the marketshare a platform that all users use whenever they interact with files.
On top of that platform you can now do anything - make your own API, distributed it with an integrated web browser, or movie-viewer, and in general get all the nice benefits that microsoft gets from having a virtual OS monopoly.
It is the whole reason why the browser war started, now on the desktop.
There is a sequence of events from where the user wants to do something till he/she gets it done. Once you get you foot in the door somewhere, you control much of the process, and can start milking the cow.
From the source above:
I think this opens up some serious security questions, but those will have to wait until the OS is released later this year.
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.
Teach him to eat and he will fish forever.
I am wondering if any of these desktop search utilities upload stats to their servers. Since I don't run Windows, I can't download and try these out; but it would be interesting to go over their EULAs with a fine-toothed comb and see what can/cannot be done by these utilities.
But there is money to be made in desktop search, and we and some of our competitors have been doing so for years. The trick is to sell a premium quality product to people who have sufficient need that they're happy to pay a reasonable price for it. Not dumbed-down, feature crippled search software, but a fully-featured, professional, top-shelf product. It's worth paying for, and you know what, it's more fun to produce, too, because your users see the value.
That's completely incorrect. I have over 140MB of e-mails at work. I have to save them (record retention at an investment firm). Google desktop can tell me in less than a second who I sent a particular PDF to 4 years ago. I can find every reference to a server in all documents and e-mails to track its history.
Just because you don't have enough stuff to search through doesn't mean others can't organize. You can create as many folders as you want, it's still a ton of crap to look through.
Developers: We can use your help.
Wake Up! What business do you think Yahoo and Google are in? How do you think they make money? Does just having a bunch of people use your free search engine/instant messenger/web-mail/whatever just magically generate revenue? No, these comapnies are in the Advertising Business. They sell advertising space. Everything else is just a way to get you to watch (and hopefully click) their ads.
Of course, that doesn't mean that they can't be very nice companies with great products. For google especially, that seems to have been a successful strategy. Just remember, "be nice" is not their business plan.
Better search is supposed to be a big deal I think in Longhorn, and that is really the thing that Google is trying to prevent the eventual adoption of at the cost of thier own search traffic.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The article missed the BIGGEST way to make money from search ... developing search tools for corperations.
3 453331
These desktop search engines are "dry runs" for the real "holy grail" in search - enterprise search!
see http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/
I think it's even more important on the Internet. Brand loyalty on the internet is a critical factor for an internet company. It gets loyal users/customers to pass around your link. And people can be very fickle. With so many options it's easy to jump to something else and never return. There are thousands of search engines, but most people have only heard of Google, Yahoo, and (unfortunately) MSN and stick with them. Look at how quickly Google rose immediately after their fellow college students became loyal customers.
Developers: We can use your help.
When people drive into town, do the billboard owners hope they'll "click" on the billboards?
When you read an ad in a computer magazine, does the advertiser hope you'll just run off and order right then and there?
The idea about advertising in general is to place the advertiser in the mindscape of a certain populace. Do I know which toothpastes are better than others? No, but when I see a bunch of toothpaste brands sitting around on a shelf in a store, I already have previous conceptions about many of them.
In short, I pick what I think I know, or at least feel least discomfortable in picking (in the absense of more information, that is). In some ways, ads are about building choosing habits before people even encounter the choice.
You're pimping your product in every topic about desktop search, aren't you?
WinFS has actually been pushed back as well, but I think they are still embedding some searching technologies. They have been trying to do that for a while though which is probably what got google worried.
I wonder what IS in Longhorn?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
But useability is another matter entierly. I seriously doubt that Yahoo or MSN will come up with a fast, "user-friendly" searh tool. If theres advertisments, they had better be small, non-disruptive in nature, or it will piss everyone off and have a negative impact on society's productiveness. There already is indexed searching stuff in Windows. Its not great, but it has the right idea. It runs a service in the background and it looks/feels like a normal search tool. Except, that animated dog should be disabled by default (for performance and relevance reasons). These new file search tools are going in the wrong direction - theyre trying to make you, the user, conform to their interface (standards) - which were made for INTERNET searching - when you've already become accustomed to standard file search interfaces. It will also probably do unnessecarily disruptive things like run in the taskbar (slow your computer down) and prompt you for updates. Though, there is definitely room for a better advanced search thing in Linux. Mayby we'll be able to use it in scripts to help find different locations of things, such as in source compiling (eg: cant find qtlibs dir, please use --qtlibs="dir" then recompile).
Ok, show of hands. How many of you running Linux or FreeBSD does NOT have htdig and locate (or FreeBSD variants) already installed? Hmm... Nobody.
Ok, Mac guys. How many, show of hands, don't be shy... How many of you don't use Finder to find things? Nobody. Ok...
Windows guys! Ok, I KNOW you'll be interested. Show of hands, who here doesn't use or know about "find files"? Nobody? Come on, SOMEONE in here must need a new search tool. Anybody? Come on, you're killing me here.
Ok, tough audience. I can roll with that.
Alright, let's pretend for a minute that you DIDN'T have a directory/file search tool installed on your computer. That's DID NOT. OK? Now, show of hands. Who here is willing to install my new tool FindYourCrap, for the low low low price of 29.95, with the understanding that I'll have a few ads running from time to time and you have no expectation of privacy, etc, etc, it's all in the EULA.
What? Nobody? Come ON people! I gave you bagels. Doesn't ANYBODY want some of this?
Fine. FINE! You people are pains in the... Ok, look, I'll tell you what, I've got a line on these condos in Florida...
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
I'm farely well organized and I don't use my desktop search service (shameless plug http://nariva.sf.net/) much for finding things that I know are there. One of the real benefits is finding things that are related to things that are there. All Desktop search is is a data mining application for end users. Money probably wouldn't be made from ad revenue but from branding, customization and corporate search services. Search is the key to any good content management system and that is the future of the agile business. Providing it to end users now gives you mindshare when it arrives in the future.
So you've had a computer since 1994. Wow!
//c in 1984. What does that have to do with anything?
... constant time. Think of a hashtable.
As long as we're pulling our history, my first one was an Apple
The article is talking about "desktop search", but if you had bothered to read it or understand it, you will see that these are indexed services that search quickly and on a greater variety than something like grep!
Grep is for plain text documents, it's not going to work on PDF files, office documents, and all the other weird formats that exist on a normal PC.
Indexed searching, like web searching, is a way to get to the results basically in O(1) time
Regular non indexed search or something like find and/or grep, is iterative, and will never achive constant time by the mere fact that it has to visit the very files you're looking for.
> "Gee, um, I wrote a thesis on roller-coasters 3 years ago, an um, I used the word dorkifier!"
I have thousands upon thousands of documents on my computer, including source code, you're going to tell me that grep is going to be better than GDS in finding all instances of notes, emails, and source discussing a particular API or classname?
It's not only about organizing files, it's about getting the information quickly, and getting it in as many formats as possible. In addition, with GDS I can access older versions (cached) of my files, so it servers as a primitive version history that you get for free?
Why you think this is for idiots or useless really says more about you than the people using it. You don't even seem to grasp the basic essence of what is being discussed here!
I really recommend you stop embarassing yourself.
- sigs are for wimps.
... we're talking about (indexed search vs linear search) you're going to put the MS card?
.NET have to do with usage of the tools being talked about in the article?
If you have any clue, you can find an indexed search service for linux, but since I don't think you understand this concept yet let me help you out.
http://freshmeat.net/projects/glimpse/
What does VC++ or
- sigs are for wimps.
From the Terms and conditions:
Non-commercial Use Only
Google Desktop Search is made available to you for your non-commercial use only. If you want to make commercial use of Google Desktop Search, including but not limited to selling or distributing Google Desktop Search for payment, you must enter into an agreement with Google or obtain Google's written permission in advance.
Therefore, using it in a commercial sense, ie - at you place of work will probably require giving google some money
Free desktop search opens up a lot of possible applications using it to carry part of the load. I would bet these companies have more than a few such in mind. Also, brand/stack loyalty is nothing to sneeze at. Personally I think the better question is whether these desktop search offerings have APIs accessible to third party vendors. Would be start-ups want to know!
The privacy concerns remain, but I think the search vendors will be okay financially once large companies are able to see the potential of such an infrastructure.
Social media and technology thoughts: http://jasonkinner.wordpress.com