Everyone is searching for something; love, jobs, information, people, cars, houses, music, books, movies, apartments, classifieds, etc. I saw Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, speak at the Nantucket Conference earlier this year. He asked the audience what activities they did on the Internet. The audience responded with all kinds of activities. Eric replied to each individual "That is search", "That is search"...to him every activity was a form of search. He was right.
cNet has a story today "Can there be another Google?" Here is the lead paragraph from the story.
"Internet search is reaching an important pivot point, where market leaders are rewarded by Wall Street, laggards are punished, and start-ups try to fill niches left empty by the major players. "
"Though the market has seen a few leaders come and go over the last decade--anyone remember AltaVista?--few would doubt that a distinct top tier has emerged, occupied by Google, Yahoo, AOL and MSN."
Ouch! That hurts! I was director of engineering at AltaVista back in 1997 - 2000 when AltaVista was the pioneer in search. I wrote an earlier post about why AltaVista failed so I will not recite it here. The thing to remember is that there were dominant leaders in search at the time (AltaVista, Excite, FAST, Lycos, Yahoo, and others) and there was no real business model other than banner ads. Search was a commodity service. AOL, Yahoo, MSN, and others were making all the money running community sites, while outsourcing their search service from AltaVista, Inktomi, Ask Jeeves, and others.
Google changed the model. They only allowed contextual text ads, no banner ads. They auctioned the keywords to the highest bidder in an automated way rather than employ lots of direct sales people. They syndicated their search and ads to other sites. These were fundamental changes to the business model that really made Google a success.
Can there be another Google? Sure! The final chapter has not been written in the search business. There are lots of companies innovating in the search space. I highlighted some of them in "Innovation is bursting out again".
The innovations will be in relevance, using collaborative filtering, social networks, attention metrics, and other techniques to produce better search results. There will be more specialty search services focusing on People search, Dating search, Job search, Shopping search, Car search, Local search, Classifieds search, Real Estate search, Apartment search. As Eric Schmidt said it is all search. Back at AltaVista we invented Image search, Video search, and Music search. The technology was great. The problem was there wasn't a good business model to monetize the service. In fact, all of the specialty search services mentioned above have been around for a while.
The real innovation in search will be new business models and service models that make specialty search into a great business. That is the real innovation Google brought to general web search. Search technology can certainly improve, but search business models are the place to focus.
Think about the things you do everyday and how they could be improved with better search services. There is a lot of money spent every year finding houses, apartments, cars, jobs, dates, and people. The next Google will probably be a company that figures out how to do one of these things really well.
Just to get you thinking here is a list of specialty search companies I mentioned in an earlier post. The list is old and incomplete. Do you have others to add to the list?
Jookster - collaborative filtered search, friends network, ranking.
Wink - filtered search, tagging, rating, collaborative filtering
Zoominfo - People search
Tech.memeorandum - Real-time Blog/news clipper service
Sphere - blog search
SearchFox - blog search
TailRank - Blog personalized search/recommendation/ranking engine
Findory - personalized search/recommendation engine
Loomia - Podcast/videocast search
Zvents - local event search
Don,
Great list.....
Add www.riya.com for photo search. I've been Alpha testing it and they have a great start of what could be a very central service/utility for collaborative identification to build the training sets and then automated recognition/search.
What ever happened to the AltaVista image, video & music rearch technology? It is collecting dust in HP's patent portfolio? You guys were so early I'm sure there are some nuggets in there.
Myron
Posted by: Myron Kassaraba | December 06, 2005 at 01:59 PM
Could not agree with you more Don - its the business model we need to focus on. I also think that search engines should be reversed - rather than have a consumer search for a merchant - how about a merchant search for a consumer - with the consumer in control of how much, and what type of information they are receiving. I'm throwing some ideas out on my blog and why I think this is a paradigm shift in marketing.
Posted by: Richard Ruekema | December 06, 2005 at 04:46 PM