I won’t even address the fact that it would be nice for one of these articles to actually include MetaMojo.com in the vertical search OR people power categories… forget that, that’s my pride speaking. Though I would like to stress that MetaMojo.com is a bigger vertical search player than many of the ones listed in that or other post. I’d also stress that MetaMojo.com can overnight become a social search contestant but we don’t think that social search will be anything other than a spam magnet for now.
But… another day goes by when another site publishes a “who will beat Google in search” article.
Let me be clear on this: no company will ever displace Google in search. That race is over. Yes, I am familiar with Altavista, Yahoo! etc., but there is one major difference in the debate:
Monetization of search.
When Altavista gave up on search, it did so because the money was in impressions and portaldom, and not search. Today Google commands nearly 50% market share in the most lucrative space of all of online advertising. One out of every four dollar spent on online advertising is spent through Google.
To further stress why no one will beat Google, consider this: most of the wanna be Google challengers probably turn to Google to monetize their search. As such, to argue that anyone will displace Google shows a lack of common sense.
The best bet - MetaMojo.com’s included - for search startups is to find complementary niches to help make search better. Or to find a way to have a search component in their respective networks, like MetaMojo.com fits in the Mojo Supreme network of sites. We have contextual, vertical, or niche properties, and vertical search is a good fit in our network.
The best bet for established search players (MSN, Yahoo!, Ask, AOL) is to fight for #2.
The fight for #1 in search has long been over. 2006 saw Google build its lead over Yahoo!, had Yahoo! shrunk the lead, it would be a different matter. Unfortunately, no one will beat Google in search, never.
Disclosure: I own YHOO
January 3rd, 2007 at 11:00 am
Why Google is probably invincible
Anybody can build a search engine. And anybody can take a pen and draw a crude map of the world in a few minutes. But guess what? The most precise free map/ search engine of the Internet gets most of the queries. And the search company with the highest viewership makes more profits and can afford a higher level of search engine improvement. Google has the leading search map now, and can profitably spend the most money on map improvement.
But this virtuous cycle of search engine development and financing only points to a high barrier to entry for the paid search business — It does not explain why Google’s search network is probably invincible. Google’s invincibility stems from its market share of humans doing searches.
In other words, the biggest network of roving software robots only finds the biggest set of possibly valid websites for your search. And improved indexing algorithms only give a preliminary machine-based preference for these search returns. It is ultimately the gleaned preferences of the humans that have gone before you that give human meaning to the robot searches. Without the human network, the robot index is still only as smart as a bunch of dumb computers. That is to say, it is easily tricked by cleaver humans.
The human user network lets Google understand among other things, which search results are the last ones that people click on (ie. The human found what it was looking for). The search network with the most humans searching gets the most accurate search returns in human terms — And the search engine with the most humanly accurate search returns maintains its dominance.
Some people argue that a breakthrough method of obtaining greater statistical accuracy with half of the sample size would unseat Google. They argue that Yahoo may find some way to obtain as much search accuracy from a particular search by 50,000 customers as Google generates from 100,000.
With large sample sizes, the idea is at least theoretically possible. If we compare this situation to a public opinion survey, the difference in survey methodology could easily matter far more than increasing the sample size from 50,000 to 100,000. However, this idea falls apart when only say 2 people undertake highly specific searches in that particular day. With small samples, the methodology (within reason) is less critical than the sample size. And perhaps half of all searches could be considered small sample size searches.
If Google has seen 2 people searching for something, Yahoo with its 2nd place market share might not have had any customers at all doing that search. And Yahoo might not be able to draw any up to the minute customer inference, no matter how many thousands of pages of websites Yahoo’s robots turn up.
In order to make any serious headway in search, Yahoo and MSN must stop losing human market share and start gaining it. And in order to do that, Yahoo and MSN must prove to the public that they are not merely equal to Google, but superior. And they must now do so while overcoming the handicap of a smaller human user network to sample and base their search returns on. Absent that miracle, Google will simply continue to return more accurate search returns, and its reputation will continue to spread. Eventually, even the folks who barely know the difference between an email address and URL will know of Google’s superiority. That will be the end of the other search engines. There is only room for one dominant search engine, just like there can only be one consciousness in a person and one common language to among people.
Google already has more than twice the market share of Yahoo and nearly four times the market share of MSN. According to Metcalf’s law (the value of a network increases roughly in proportion to the square of its size) Google’s search network would be something like four or more times more valuable than Yahoo’s, and something like 16 times more valuable than MSN’s. Absent a miracle, the fate of Yahoo search, MSN search, and the assorted small fry search engines is already sealed.
More about google at “TheOfficalBlog.com”