TIME.com: Search And Destroy -- Dec. 22, 2003: "Whoever wins the search wars owns the keys to the kingdom of knowledge. That's a big responsibility. Are search engines up to it? "
Letting the market solve these problems by itself is the American way. We like to assume that the most objective, least biased search engine will naturally win the search wars. (A typical European approach, by contrast, would be to nationalize Google at once, before it's too late.) This means that, for now, we're relying on the integrity of people like Larry Page. But when the competition gets stiff and Page has to answer to his shareholders, integrity may be a luxury Google can no longer afford.
Google is a highly unusual company, one run by true technologists with a genuine love of banging on things, shaking and breaking them, and making them better. Behind the simple, unassuming Google home page is a wizard's workshop of experimentation, much of it useless, some of it brilliant. "Invariably we try 10 things that don't quite work out in order to do one thing that's successful," says Page, who speaks in a slow, deeply nerdy, singsong voice. "And we learn a lot in doing the 10 things that didn't quite work." For example, you can call a phone number in California — it's 650-318-0165--and do a Google search over the phone. Why would you ever want to? Who knows? Or go to catalogs.google.com, and you'll discover a service that searches 6,000 mail-order catalogs for you. Some lost soul at Google literally sits there and scans catalogs...
Do they even make money from it? "No," Page admits affably. "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful. And catalogs are part of the world's information." But let's get this straight, you aren't doing this stuff altruistically, for the general good of humanity, are you? "Well, we kind of are. We always kind of figured that if we did a good job of providing the right information for everybody in the world, all the time, that would be an important thing to do...
Microsoft held talks with Google this fall, but no deal was struck. Plan B, already well under way, is for Microsoft to build a better search engine. A prototype Microsoft webcrawler (the software that search engines use to index the Web) was spotted online as early as last April. Kirk Konigsbauer, general manager of the project, says MSN Search isn't ready for prime time quite yet. "We decided to take a deep dive into the search business about a year ago," he says. "We're learning a lot. This is a really hard computer-science problem. In fact, our engineers say this is the hardest computer-science problem they've ever had to face." But if there's one thing Microsoft is good at, it's entering profitable markets late and strong — just ask Netscape, Apple or IBM. If Microsoft integrates its new search engine into MSN, its Internet service provider, and Longhorn, its next-generation operating system (E.T.A. 2006), the game may be over...
"Google's most enigmatic foe isn't a search engine at all. It's a bookstore. In October Amazon debuted a service it calls Search Inside the Book that's both simple in conception and staggering in its implications. Amazon scanned every page of 120,000 books into a database, and it now lets customers search the books' complete contents online. In one stroke, Amazon made a new and immensely valuable kind of information available on the Web. Zenodotus would be livid with envy. "I would compare it to the invention of the encyclopedia,"
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos isn't done yet. Behind a smothering veil of secrecy, he's setting up a new search company in Palo Alto, Calif., called A9.com. "All I can tell you is that we're working on some interesting things that we simply cannot talk about at this point," says Bezos. The scuttlebutt is that A9 will be focused on product search, so it will compete less with Google than with Froogle — a relatively small slice of the search market but potentially the richest.
Yahoo is spending a fortune on mounting a comeback. Yahoo bought Inktomi, a top-flight algorithmic search engine, in March for $235 million. In October it swallowed Overture, which specializes in so-called paid search (we'll get to that later), for $1.63 billion — while Overture was itself in the middle of digesting two recent acquisitions, AltaVista and AlltheWeb. The plan, as near as anybody outside Yahoo can make out, is to stitch all those disparate organizations into one huge Frankenstein's monster of a search engine that will strike terror into the hearts of all who behold
Paid search combines two things that advertisers desperately want: targeted ads (ads that are shown only to consumers who have demonstrated interest in the product) and performance-based ads (for which the advertiser has to pony up only when a user clicks on its links).
"Nothing is more valuable than the user at the moment of desire," says Gartner analyst Whit Andrews. "When a user searches, that user has a demand. At that moment in time, they want."
The Web is rapidly supplanting other media as the primary means by which people get information about the world — not just sports scores but news, car prices, history, famous quotations and potential dates. This is information that matters. Google — or any search engine — isn't just another website; it's the lens through which we see that information, and it affects what we see and don't see. At the risk of waxing Orwellian, how we search affects what we find and by extension how we learn and what we know.
Some search engines are owned by large, diversified corporations. Should they be allowed to push the websites of their own businesses to the top of the stack? Could a search engine suppress the website of a political party with which its CEO disagreed? Or a particular version of the Bible or of the Battle of Midway? These are important questions, and regulators have barely started asking them.
posted by Jen @ 9:40 AM
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