Category: Search Engines

Valleywag lists out some potential challengers to Google. “What will replace Google? Maybe a retooled search from someone like Ask.com, or a hacked-up tool from three guys in Russia that no one’s heard of. But my money’s on the Balkanization of search, in which users check Wikipedia, Yelp, or Flickr for specific types of searches. No wonder Google made sure to corner the two prime search niches of maps and video.”

MEX writes:

I find the most effective way to obtain the information I want in the mobile environment is through 82ASK. It involves no graphics or Java downloads and is available on even the most basic mobile handsets. You simply text your question to 82275 (in the UK) and they send you back an answer.

Each question costs GBP 1.00 and it can take several minutes for an answer to arrive, but the experience is superior for several reasons. Firstly, the answer is almost always exactly what youre looking for and, secondly, the time delay is asynchronous. The interaction method of SMS is perfect for the mobile environment, because you can quickly input a question and then put your phone away and forget about it until it beeps to alert you to the answer. When you’re walking down a street or standing on a train, this is a much better way to request information than the synchronous continuity of the browser environment.

WSJ writes:

Search engines have long generated the same results for queries whether the person searching was a mom, mathematician or movie star. Now, who you are and what you’re interested in is starting to affect the outcome of your search.

Google Inc. and a wide range of start-ups are trying to translate factors like where you live, the ads you click on and the types of restaurants you search for into more-relevant search results. A chef who searched for “beef,” for example, might be more likely to find recipes than encyclopedia entries about livestock. And a film buff who searched for a new movie might see detailed articles about the making of the film, rather than ticket-buying sites.

Fred Wilson writes:

Many marketers have reached the point that they can’t easily buy more search. It’s getting harder. Keyword markets are becoming efficient and supply and demand are coming into balance. Of course, that alone doesn’t mean that all the other money will move into banners. Banners also need to produce measured returns.

But, banners carry branding value that text ads don’t. The return on investment measure is not as cold and hard with banners. And the big branded advertisers that are leaving TV and print in search of better performance on the internet want to be able to brand with their ads. And they want to control where those ads are run. They’ll pay more for those two features.

So branding/banners may grow faster than search/CPC in the coming years, or at least grow as quickly.

Dave Winer writes: “By 2007, with search integrated into society at a very deep level, and only getting deeper — it seems like it’s way past time to fix this. And we know how to do it, and it’s not even very hard…How? Integrate social networking and search and learn what people who I’m connected with, people like me, choose when they search for RSS and adjust the results accordingly. It’s collaborative filtering applied to search.”

Read/Write Web writes:

Google – through its text ads strategy – has managed to weave itself into the very fabric of the Web. In doing this, the company freed itself from even Internet geography and became ubiquitous. By empowering companies and individuals to publish Google ads on their sites, Google solved the unlimited supply and demand problem in one fell swoop.

So how does Google compare to Starbucks, which is a very good money making machine in the real world? The key differences between Google and Starbucks are:

* Starbucks spends money on expansion, but Google ads spread themselves;
* Starbucks spends a lot of money on maintenance, Google spends little;
* Starbucks spends money on marketing, but businesses flock to Google because it just works;
* Starbucks relies on people, Google relies on software.

These differences make Google by far the more attractive business, compared to Starbucks. To put it simply, Google has almost no friction.

SearchEngineWatch writes about a recent conference:

The buzz around video throughout the marketplace has largely been driven by the awareness and popularity that YouTube has brought to the medium. But this has more recently reached a local level, with an ecosystem that is beginning to form around the production and automated distribution of video advertising for small businesses.
…
The challenge [in mobile search] will be pushing out mobile local search applications given the fragmentation of mobile services, and the carrier control present in the US mobile market that makes it difficult for mobile search providers to get applications in front of consumers.

Business Week asks in a cover story if Google has become too powerful.

To the consternation of many of those companies and more, Google is now using that market cap, along with its $11 billion hoard of cash and investments, to storm a wide range of traditional markets. It’s selling ads in newspapers, magazines, radio, and, in a trial program, television. In February it fired a torpedo at the software industry with a suite of online office software it is selling for a small fraction of the price of Microsoft Corp.’s (MSFT ) Office. It’s spooking the telecom industry with fledgling efforts to provide free wireless Internet access. Google’s phenomenal ad machine, in short, has the potential to vaporize the profits of any industry that traffics in bits and bytes and to shift the economics to the advantage of Google, its users, and its cadre of partners. “It’s Google’s world,” shrugs Chris Tolles, vice-president of marketing at Topix Inc., which makes money from running Google ads on its news aggregation site. “We just live in it.”

Googlezon, GoogleWorld, just plain Googlewhatever you call it, it’s scaring the wits out of everyone from the power lunchers of Hollywood to Madison Avenue ad moguls to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Now, after years of hand-wringing and thumb-twiddling, some of them are pulling out the heavy artillery and firing one round after another on the Googleplex, the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

Wap Review compares the two.

Via Chetan Sharma from an article by Peggy Anne Saltz: “A key problem for the mobile data industry is subscribers trying to find a specific piece of content or a specific application. All of the major operators offer an excellent and expansive range of games, ring tones and many other applications. While choice is great for the consumer, if they can find what they are looking for, the sheer number of options available is bewildering. It is impossible to browse and navigate the labyrinth navigation structures available today. Mobile search helps tie together otherwise silo‟d catalogs and deep navigation trees for ringtones, graphics, games, music, sports, news and other content.”