With a single dominant player, the Web search market hasn’t exactly been fertile ground for startups and emerging companies with innovative new technologies. But a flurry of venture capital investment, product development, acquisitions, and other industry activity seems to mark the beginning of a new era in search, one in which specialists play a bigger role.
Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) handles 62 percent of Web search queries, followed by Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO) and Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT), according to research firm Nielsen Online . Behind them is a proliferation of upstarts, promising nuanced forms of consumer-oriented Web searches, arcane new “semantic Web” and contextual search services, mobile search, and search results in other guises, such as NewsGator feeds.
The burst of activity over the past 12 months is more befitting a land rush than a market dominated by one powerhouse:
Semantic Web search engine Hakia Inc. , founded in 2004 by a group of European scientists, debuted late last year a “social search” feature designed to connect users with people of similar interests. A $5 million investment in January brought its total to $21 million.
In January, contextual search specialist Silobreaker Ltd. launched its new engine for relations-mapping and trend analysis on topics and people.
A few weeks later, startup Surf Canyon released its Discovery Engine, a browser plug-in that disambiguates (i.e., reorders based on relevance) search results from the major engines in real time.
In March, SearchMe Inc. launched its “visual search” capability and category suggestions for nontext searches. The three-year-old company landed $16 million in venture capital this year, bringing its total to $31 million from the likes of Sequoia Capital and Lehman Brothers.
Ask.com , one of the original “plain English” search engines, said in May it will acquire Lexico, the owner of Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com.
Search aggregator Viewzi , which presents results from top search engines in innovative and user-friendly interfaces, introduced its new tools in June.
Search startup Cuil Inc. , created by a pair of Google veterans and purporting to index billions more Web pages than Google, launched in July.
For business users, the flourishing of new search technologies could bring relief from a growing dissatisfaction with the information overload delivered by a typical Google search. At-work surfers (assuming they’re actually working and not looking for the latest Gnarls Barkley video) “are not just exploring and experiencing things on the Web,” says Surf Canyon founder Mark Cramer. “Their objective is more specific, and they need to get it in a more timely fashion.”
The big three aren’t standing still. In July, Yahoo announced Yahoo Search Boss, a Web-services platform that will let developers create new search tools based on Yahoo APIs -- tools that could compete with Yahoo itself. About the same time, Microsoft moved to bolster its Live Search with the acquisition of Powerset, a developer of semantic search.
And Google continues to plow ahead. Interviews with Google’s search gurus show that the company is devoting a chunk of its $16.5 billion in annual revenue to improving its search tools and investing in businesses that drive users to those tools. Yet Google is spread thinner than ever: It’s promoting its operating system for mobile devices, Android; putting out a browser to compete with Internet Explorer; pushing into cloud computing; dedicating resources to enterprise search; and developing an entirely new industry around clean, renewable energy sources.
That’s a full slate even for a company with a market cap around $146 billion. Like many technology leaders before it, Google could get distracted from its core business and miss the next wave of innovation. “I think there are major opportunities being created because there’s so much broad focus on how to be a search behemoth,” says Brad Bostic, co-founder and president of mobile search provider ChaCha Search Inc. “That makes it difficult to be really great at all those niche areas.”
Popular and the not-so-popular search engines keep innovating to sustain themselves in the market. Google's possible acquisition of Twitter could help it reach up to the next level of search experience. I read a report on Yahoo trying to link its users for social networking even while browsing for other things. Evolution seems to happen to keep competitors afloat in business and compete. Googling experience on mobile phones could definitely be a big step triggering more competition.
Under the circumstances of continued evolution and competition, a day may not be far off, when google or other sites could just detect your brain impulse and throw out the related content on a memory chip embedded in your watch or under the soft skin of your palm. Why would you complain when you have to merely think of it and you got it! I would definitely go crazy and even afraid of thinking of so many things! Can it happen?
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Recently, the Obama administration has been of two minds where privacy rights are concerned. On one hand, you have an administration that vowed to veto CISPA and mandated open data for government websites. On the other hand, you have an increasingly out-of-control Department of Justice on a fishing expedition at AP and demanding legislation to let the FBI wiretap private, encrypted communications and levy fines if a company fails to comply.
The apartment and house sharing service, Airbnb, now requires members to verify their identities by demonstrating a presence on the web, and by either scanning a government ID or entering detailed personal details. Other enterprises should take a close look at Airbnb's verification policies.
Facebook advertising is a lightning rod. It seems neither brands nor consumers are 100 percent happy about the social media site's policies, placement, or procedures. But the real controversy about Facebook ads and promotions is over whether they work.
By now, you've most likely heard about the 3D-printed gun that Texas-based Defense Distributed demonstrated last week. But we haven't heard the last about the censorship war that began soon afterward.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
Subsidized handsets, rather than locked handsets, should be the focus of regulators. We're not getting good deals, not fostering innovation, and weakening our power as buyers.
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