The search engine space is filled with a slew of companies that are vying to become the next Google. What is the "next Google"? It's a search engine that captures the majority of the search engine market--a feat that hasn't been accomplished since Google claimed that crown a decade ago when it finally beat out AltaVista and Yahoo.
Yahoo is still a major player internationally even though it's losing ground both in the U.S. and abroad. Microsoft is scrambling to capture double-digit market share. There are many smaller search engines like Quintura and Cuil, the self-proclaimed "Google Killer." The competition is fierce. But so far, it isn't dangerous to Google.
According to research firm Hitwise, approximately 69.5 percent of Internet searches in the U.S. were completed on Google's service during 2008, representing an 8 percent increase over 2007.
Yahoo and Microsoft, the second- and third-place search engines, respectively, didn't fare nearly as well. Yahoo captured 19.2 percent of the search market during 2008, representing an 11 percent drop for the year, while Microsoft accommodated just 5.9 percent of all searches during 2008, a decline of 32 percent since 2007. Ask.com rounded out the top four with 3.8 percent market share, growing 1 percent year over year.
It's quite evident that if there will be another Google, the numbers (and growth) are not working in the challenger's favor. But let's look at the qualitative hurdles a challenger would have to clear:
Relevance and speed
In an interview last year with a Google representative on my podcast, the CNET Digital Home Podcast, I was told that the key to Google's success, and more importantly, a key component in its corporate culture, is its willingness and desire to get search users going to the destination site as quickly as possible. He said that Google recognizes itself as a "middleman" and getting users to its intended site quickly is paramount if it wants to be successful.
But the only way to achieve that goal is to provide users with relevant results. Although everyone's mileage may vary depending on the type of queries they input into search engines, I've always found Google's search to be the most relevant. I have a feeling I'm not alone--Google's growth indicates its users are happy.
That said, we need to remember that another search engine could become as relevant or maybe even more relevant than Google.
That's why I don't necessarily believe relevance is the only indicator for the future success or failure of Google. I don't think there's any reason to believe another search engine can't enter the market and provide more relevant results. But I wonder if any other search engine can capitalize on other areas where Google has a stranglehold.
The marriage of advertising and search
Google's tallest barrier to entry in the search engine market is its advertising platform, which is the world's largest. By expanding its search, it's able to create a more enticing advertising platform through AdWords, AdSense, and its embeddable Google Search box.
AdSense, which employs Google search technology to improve conversion rates, had over 1 billion ad server calls during 2008, according to content-tracking company Attributor. It was second only to DoubleClick, an advertising company Google acquired in 2007 for $3.1 billion.
AdWords, Google's advertising platform for publishers, also lends to its success. Since Google's search is such a dominant player in the market, site owners and publishers employ AdWords to market their sites. It works: Google's 2007 revenue from AdWords tallied $16.4 billion. And since it too is tied to Google's search results, everyone has a vested interest in making sure Google's search stays on top.
Simply put, Google's search expansion makes its advertising business more lucrative for all parties involved. And as its advertising platform expands, it feeds into its search. That mutually beneficial relationship between advertising and search continues to sustain Google. Other search engines in the market don't have that luxury.
Convergence
Google has had some trouble extending its brand with services like Froogle and Google Notebook, but its entire set of popular offerings, headlined by Google Maps and Image Search, ensure users keep coming back to Google's pages. And if they're spending time there, they'll find fewer reasons to use Yahoo, Live, or any other search engine to perform queries. Especially since Google's search, at least in my testing, is the most relevant of the bunch.
That's a problem for competing search engines. Typically, smaller search engines only have the funding to improve search and try to capture more market share in that space. But since a key success factor in the market is providing more than just search, smaller firms are at a severe disadvantage.
Ubiquity
Google's search is pervasive. It's found on millions of Web sites that employ site search. If you use Firefox, you'll notice that Google is the default search engine in the box to the right of the address bar. If you have an iPhone or an Android G1, you'll find that Google Search is built into those devices too.
Sure, users can switch from Google to Yahoo in Firefox and no one is making them use Google search on the iPhone, but how many really take the time to switch? There are times when I don't even think about the search engine I'm using and input a few queries into Firefox. Each time, I'm redirected to a Google search results page because I've never changed it from the default. And as Firefox and the iPhone continue to gain in popularity, the number of people using Google's search will continue to grow with them.
Because of that, it's getting more difficult for competitors to get their search engine into prominent products like Firefox and the iPhone--a key success factor in the search business. Regardless, it's a necessary step if a company wants to beat Google.
Entering the public consciousness
One of the toughest battles a competitor will need to wage is removing Google from the public consciousness. The average person who doesn't follow search engines or has little knowledge about the Web, usually doesn't say, "I need to surf to my favorite search engine and find out about President Obama's economic policy."
It may sound simplistic, but I've found that many people use the term, "Google it" to describe their intention to search for something on the Web. Google has become a verb. The "search engine market" doesn't exist in many households. It's just "Google." That's the ultimate goal in branding. And the ultimate nightmare for that company's competitors.
Cash and size
Google, with over $8 billion in cash and no debt in its financial structure, has more than enough capital to invest in two key areas: product development and acquisitions. The only other company that can compete financially on the same level with Google is Microsoft, which currently has over $9 billion and no debt in its own financial structure.
Size doesn't necessarily mean much if we are to consider the staying power of a company. At any time, they can lose market share and falter. Just look at Yahoo for proof of that. But that doesn't mean size shouldn't come into the equation either. Google can very easily acquire any company that it feels is gaining too much ground in the space or it could use its size and power in the industry to ensure a respective competitor won't enter into strategic partnerships with third parties.
Being able to stymie Microsoft's or Yahoo's partnerships would be difficult, given the power of those two companies. But if a new entrant tries to make its way to the top of the search market, battling Google's cash and size will certainly be difficult, if not impossible.
Can Google be conquered? To say no would be foolish: Google itself vanquished AltaVista and Yahoo when the odds were against it. But today's search engine market is bigger and more complex. Vanquishing Google is becoming more difficult with each passing day.
Related: Google: Healthy and Undervalued
Google challenger Cuil launched last night in blaze of glory. And it went down in a ball of flames. Immediately after launch, the criticism started to pile on: results were incomplete, weird, and missing.
I talked with Cuil VP of communications Vince Sollitto this morning about the launch issues. CEO Tom Costello was "busy putting out fires," Sollitto said.
Sollitto said there were two issues affecting Cuil search quality currently. First, he said, "We are trying to give people different results." Cuil is pitched as an alternative to traditional search engines, and users should not expect the results to be the same.
Fair enough, I said, but there's a difference between alternative and wrong. Which brings us to issue two: "We've only been live for twelve hours," Sollitto said, and traffic has spiked beyond their expectations. In other Web 2.0 launches, a traffic spike would slow down or crash the service, but in Cuil's architecture, the spike affected results, not speed. (Cuil did also crash briefly last night.)
This is because Cuil isn't set up as a massively parallel search network the way, say, Google is. Tom Costello had explained this to me a bit when we talked last week. Each of Cuil's search appliances is specialized to a particular subcategory of results. There are machines that understand and index sports; others are experts on medicine, etc. As these search machines get overloaded, Sollitto said, they drop offline for some queries, and the machines left online return less-than-relevant results that then appear at the top of users' pages.
Which brings us to Sollitto's parting words. Cuil, he says, "will only improve with time," he said. "It's day one. Traffic is massive. We're new. There are bugs to fix, results to improve."
I asked him if he thought it was a mistake to launch the service in such a straightforward way, without even a "beta" moniker on it. "The beta label doesn't inoculate you from scrutiny or criticism," he said. "The product was strong enough to launch."
We'll check back on Cuil after the traffic spike subsides, and we do hope the results improve. At the moment, Cuil's design and interface shows a lot of promise, but results matter, and it's simply a poor search experience.
Here are some poor Cuil results sent in by Webware readers:
This should not be too hard for a search engine.
Not useful.
Probably a symptom of an overloaded system.
Related:
New engine takes aim at Google.
Video: Gauging the odds for the latest wannabe Google rival.
Cuil's homepage.
There's a big new search engine launching Monday: Cuil. Developed and run by the husband-and-wife team of Stanford professor Tom Costello and former Google search architect Anna Patterson, it's pitched as bigger, faster, and better than Google's flagship search engine in pretty much every way. See video interview with Tom Costello, below.
I have not had a chance to spend much time with the engine. I'm getting open access to it the same time you are. I did get a preview. It's a very serious effort, and it has enough funding to get off the ground and become a player.
The most important difference between Cuil and Google is its ranking system. Rather than assigning priority to pages based on inbound links as Google does ("Pagerank"), Cuil analyzes the content of Web pages to divine their relevance to a search query. Costello bristled when I asked if this was a semantic search engine like PowerSet (recently sold to Microsoft). Costello said Cuil's search is "contextual," and that, "we're trying to understand the real world, not the Web."
Cuil really does a better job of displaying search results.
(Credit: Cuil)What this means, in the real world, is that Cuil results are automatically categorized. When you search for a common name, for example, Cuil will give you a result page where results for different individuals with that name are groups under tabs. It will also break out sub-topics related to each name. In Cuil's canned demo, if you search for "Harry," there are different tabs for "Harry Potter" and "Prince Harry of Wales." On the Harry Potter tab, you'll get further sub-links devoted to actors, Gryffindor dorm-mates, etc. "We have a strong ontological commitment," Costello told me, meaning that parsing search results into readable chunks is a very big part of the Cuil value proposition.
The service also displays images from Web results whenever possible. It all adds up to search results pages that are much more attractive, and useful, than Google's.
Another potential advantage of the context-based search is that it allows Cuil searches to be more respectful of user privacy. Unlike Google, which simply has to track every single click to refine its index, Cuil's context-based search does not. In practice, the distinction may be moot because Cuil will need to track clicks to see if their results are actually working for people, but it could serve as a marketable distinction.
Context-based indexing also presents a juicier target for search spammers, but as Costello says, "that's a success problem."
It's one thing to have a nice interface and show users good results, but the size of the Web index that the engine has access to matters a lot as well. And this is where Cuil makes its boldest claim. Costello says that the engine is launching with 120 billion pages indexed, well over the 40 billion he says Google has (although see Google's latest bluster about the company's power at Web indexing). Costello also claims that Cuil's Web crawler is three times faster than Google's, although it wasn't clear to me if he meant that is per search computer or for the entire system. Compared with Google's globe-spanning data network of data centers, some literally set up near dams so they can tap hydro power more efficiently, Cuil's two puny data centers hosting less than 2,000 PCs total will have to run pretty fast to outpace Google's crawlers.
Cuil will launch on Monday, and in a refreshing (and gutsy) move, the site is just plain launching. There's no weasely "beta" tag applied to the service. Costello thinks it'll be good enough to use from day one.
It won't, though, be as complete as Google. While Google has had failures in extending its brand (Froogle, Google Base), its collection of services that are affiliated with its mainstream search product, like Google Maps, Image Search, and desktop search, can make switching away from Google difficult for users. Costello realizes that Cuil needs to layer in additional services, but as he said to me, the company has to start somewhere.
Upshot: Cuil is certainly worth trying out. If you like it, services to put it in front of your face (a browser toolbar, and widgets) are coming soon.
As a business proposition, Cuil is obviously a big bet. While search is a monetizable business, it's hard to change the behavior of a generation of Web users who think "Google" is a verb. No other search engine has come close to entering the public consciousness like this. Of course, Cuil doesn't have to trounce Google on day one. It took Google quite some time to surpass Alta Vista and Yahoo in the search wars.
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