I’ve seen a lot of new bots crawl my site recently and it got me thinking about search engines.
Basically, search is a solved problem. Of the alternatives I explored, most offered nothing exiting such as magazine-style page flipping, or thumbnail previews. I hardly see how that would help me locate useful information on the web.
No, search these days isn’t about presentation, it’s about quality of results and how much of the web you index. While #1 can always be improved, right now Google completely dominates at index size. Additionally, both of these can be influenced primarily by money by attracting great thinkers – Google – and performing massive scale-out – Google again. Google has the momentum to not only keep its current lead, but continue to refine and improve web search at a rate much greater than competitors.
The only companies(or will it be company?) that can really compete with cash and size are Yahoo and Microsoft. Yet even both of these a dwarfed in comparison to Google[source]. So your new search startup has basically ZERO chance of success unless you are lucky enough to get swooped up by one of the three mentioned above.
Obviously I’m talking about web search here. There will always be a place for niche search like local language, blogs, etc just like there will always be a place for niche products of any kind.
But I just can’t imagine who, especially in this economy, is funneling money into these other web search startups. You might as well pour it down the drain.
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I’m not sure. It would be hard. But even Google has started out as a small project that was picked up by the masses because of the simplicity of its web design and (then) search results clean of sponsor bias.
I think it’s partially up to Google which way they will go — the clean and “non evil” (which already is compromised) way or take even more advantage of its size. If they mess up enough, there will be place and time for another search engine to take its place to stand up. And IMHO it will be neither MSN nor Yahoo — people will want a clean step forward (as Google has brought in the past) and away from what annoyed them with search engines so far.
The average internet user is 100% fine with Google’s business model, context ads, and data harvesting. I think those that are concerned with such practice are already using something like http://www.scroogle.org/.
As for small projects, Microsoft was even one at one point. It has proven difficult for even vastly superior OSes (Mac, BeOS, OS/2, UNIX variants) to challenge this leadership. When Google started out, it was competing against the likes of AltaVista ran on a traditional large SMP server farm. They came in with a paradigm shift of cheap off the shelf hardware.
A paradigm shift is what allowed them to take hold, and is the only way anything else will take over. The only thing on my radar at the moment are P2P search engines where people volunteer there computers for crawling, indexing, and searching SETI@home style, but other than the cool factor I don’t see any momentum for this to take hold.
I’m not saying that Google is being threatened already — I’m just saying that I think when the time is right (it’s not yet, but might be in the next 5-10 years), Google’s throne will be replaced by a search engine that is not in the current top 5.
I think this will be the case because the masses need a big push and a huge reason for switching. What will it be? I don’t know yet. But whatever it will be, it will have to be a huge.