The Un-Google - The Search Competition 141
WinEveryGame writes "The Economist is running an article on the state of the competition for Internet Search. While Google clearly dominates, and continues to have positive momentum, its leadership is still vulnerable. The search-engine battle is not over yet." From the article: "In terms of momentum — mass times velocity — Google's lead indeed looks daunting. It has by far the most mass, with an American market share of 43% as of April, which reaches 50% counting AOL, an internet property that uses Google's search technology. This compares with 28% for Yahoo!; 13% for MSN, which belongs to Microsoft; and 6% for Ask, which is owned by IAC/Interactive Corp, a conglomerate of about 60 online media brands. Google also has velocity: its market share grew by 17% in the four quarters to this spring, whereas Yahoo! and MSN both lost share. Only Ask has more velocity — its share grew by 35% — but then again it has little mass."
The Many New Possible Fronts (Score:5, Interesting)
There are some customers (government/military included) that are aware of the two concepts of precision and recall [wikipedia.org]. Before you groan and skip this post because you recall those words from all classifying algorithms, you should take note that there are two stages we have yet to meet in this respect.
One is simply improving precision without sacrificing recall. When I search for 'horn' in Google, how many of those searches are relevant? I was thinking about a French horn (instrument) and the first link brings me to a society about them. The next three links, however, do not. You might say, "Well, gee, you should have put 'French' in your search" but is this really necessary? So there is some money to be made in "learning" search engines that tailor themselves to the user or perhaps the results could be displayed intuitively in domains of knowledge (a la Clusty [clusty.com]). So that I can select a node that applies to the correct searching term and see all results returned below that. Have you ever wished to view your search results in a format other than a linear display of ranked results? The documents are related in more than one dimension, you know. As computing power increases, I suspect there will be room to display them in two dimensions (heat/area mapping, nodes & vertices on a plane) and three dimensions (spatial 3D engines with nodes & vertices in space).
The second stage is giving the user the power to adjust precision versus recall. Even a graphical interface that shows the F-measure [wikipedia.org] relationship between precision and recall would be helpful to consider in the search engine wars. Say you give the user some control through a slider AJAX interface of a threshold ß. But the threshold isn't simply the "Google score cut off" or even a term frequency cutoff. Instead, it's applied to be a "relevance" threshold. You would score relevance by fingerprinting frequency, specificity, clustering and other useful tools by using a domain ontology or taxonomy.
Another big thing that is missing is identifying what kind of data you are searching. Social data? Scientific data? Historical data? etc. Perhaps I'm only interested in who's who to Stephen Hawking. I'd search for him and flip through nodes of separation from him to other people.
The current search sites also only tend to favor key-word regular expressions. What about searching with raw text or entire paragraphs? If you want to see an interesting demo of this, visit Collexis' Demo Site [collexis.net] which alludes to a whole new kind of searching.
The key to entering the market as a competitor with Google is to pick up Google's slack and to try to pose yourself as a complimentary service to Google. Google is terrible at closed domain searches but amazingly efficient at open domain searches. You don't want to compete with them so fill a different part of the market. Google benefits from simple design, so go to an advanced flashy complex design. Most people aren't looking for that but the people that are have nowhere to go.
The Economist is alluding to potential leadership problems inside Google. Who cares? That's not going to be Google's downfall. Google's downfall will be an new intuitive way to search and the only thing that will prevent their downfall is if they buyout the company or bone up on the technology.
The search-engine battle hasn't even hit its stride.
Re:The Many New Possible Fronts (Score:1)
Unless there is only one meaning for a word or the computer can read your mind you're going to have to be more specific. I don't see how any kind of technological advance can ever enable a computer to know which kind of horn you want without being told.
Re:The Many New Possible Fronts (Score:2, Interesting)
Let's see. It might go something like this...
ME: Computer, I'd like to do a search...
COMP
Re:The Many New Possible Fronts (Score:5, Funny)
The top 5 results?
1.Dogpile Web Search Home Page
2.Search Engine Watch: Tips About Internet Search Engines & Search
3.Lycos
4.MetaCrawler Web Search Home Page - MetaCrawler
5.Mamma Metasearch search engines on the Internet.
Google is 8th!!!!
Granted DogPile and Mamma include Google results, but it appears Google is no longer relevant. In today's world, you are judged by your Google ranking. Google is 8th when you google Search Engines. They are a has been....
Re:The Many New Possible Fronts (Score:3, Insightful)
"Google is 8th when you google Search Engines. They are a has been...."
It should be perfectly clear from your own post: noone uses the term "search engine" anymore, it's called a Google these days. Just like Xerox and Kleenex. I just googled "Google" and Google still dominates the first ten pages of results. Stanford is on page 4, Slashdot on page 8. I didn't feel the need to page on until I found Yahoo or MSN in there.
Re:The Many New Possible Fronts (Score:5, Interesting)
I still prefer Clusty.com 's way of doing search...much easier to find the most relevant thing when you type in a term used for multiple things like "Paris" Does one want the porn star or city? or "Cold Fusion".. the technology, or the programming language? Google doesn't know, and for really common terms it fails. Clusty can tell the difference, Google can't.
Even better is Yahoo's beta search that allows you to filter results of sites that are more sales oriented or research oriented. If I want to find out about the new Trek Mountain Bike, Google hits me with tons of sales sites, when really I want reviews, or vice versa. If someone could combine all those, and then maybe a Digg like system of users rating relevance, they might have something.
Re:The Many New Possible Fronts (Score:3, Informative)
I just did a search on "Paris" and it brings up a list of pages- you can mouse over the pages to get a preview of the site. It also gives you a list of categories such as "City of Paris" "Accomodations" and "Entertainment". These categories
Re:The Many New Possible Fronts (Score:2, Interesting)
1. Google
2. MSN
3. Lycos
4. Exite
5. Search Engine Watch
Re:The Many New Possible Fronts (Score:2)
Re:The Many New Possible Fronts (Score:2)
Google supposedly does that, or will in the near future, assuming that you are logged in. From what I understand, most of the /. crowd considers that to be a fairly big integrity issue and don't search while logged in. (Or maybe they are just a vocal minority?)
Re:The Many New Possible Fronts (Score:1)
Am I the only one who sees privacy issues here? One concept of the next gen search engine that the article addresses is just this: one that tracks my every click, learns about me, and tailors searches in terms of that knowledge. I wonder just how clear a picture this data could paint of a person? How much of myself do I want represented in someone elses database, without a clear sense of how they'll use it or
Re:The Many New Possible Fronts (Score:3, Insightful)
Yep. These are some of the same problems that present themselves in the document management / knowledge management / ECM market. What I want is a taxonomy. That way I can drill down when I search for horn and see the results categorized appropriately.
But how do you present a taxonomy? It's not easy, and you really need to know the context. Example: what is a generator? Enter that word into Google and the first page is entirely links for products to generate ASCII art or ba
Re:The Many New Possible Fronts (Score:2, Interesting)
> tailor themselves to the user
I for one, wouldn't want a search engine that customizes its output to that extent for me (not the way it looks, or the ordering, but the content itself). I'd like to see results for all types of horns even though I've only been interested in air horns in my previous searches. That'd be like only watching a particular news channel that is known to be slanted one way, you'd end up thinking to world is ju
Re:The Many New Possible Fronts (Score:1)
this could be the biggest pitfall
Your suggestions of categorizing results according to search term meaning is already being taken, i saw few with clear distinction classified in google, but needs improvement.
Re:The Many New Possible Fronts (Score:2)
Re:The Many New Possible Fronts (Score:2)
So there is some money to be made in "learning" search engines that tailor themselves to the user or perhaps the results could be displayed intuitively in domains of knowledge (a la Clusty [clusty.com]).
Perhaps it sounds paradoxical, but typically I am searching for things OUTSIDE my areas of expertise so how much of this sort of learning is really practical?
Re:The Many New Possible Fronts (Score:2)
I suspect that whatever search engine innovations come along, the use of a little smarts and specificity on the user's part will always pay off.
If a search engine returns results in clusters and hierarchies,
ROI (Score:1)
Re:The Many New Possible Fronts (Score:2)
But since we are trying to compare quantities... (Score:3)
Re:But since we are trying to compare quantities.. (Score:2)
Note that I had to pull the figures for the growth rate of Yahoo! out of my butt here, but since we know from the article that they're growing slower than Google, selecting one percentage point l
Re:But since we are trying to compare quantities.. (Score:2)
Re:But since we are trying to compare quantities.. (Score:2)
Does google really dominate? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is just one example, but it happens constantly...
Re:Does google really dominate? (Score:5, Interesting)
Totally agree. It isn't that Google is great; it is IMO quite far from it.
Personally I only stick to Google because of their usenet search. I honestly think their web search is crap thanks to google spammers, or those self titled Search Engine Optimizers.
I actually thing Yahoo's search engine is somewhat superior... I kinda like search.yahoo.com [yahoo.com]
Re:Does google really dominate? (Score:2)
But the crappy thing is, Google has a vested interest in making you search longer. The more time you spend on their search engine, viewing more pages, the more ads you see. We are not Google's customers; we are Google's product.
Imagine, if they were to add your relevant results on page 3 instead of page 1, you've just viewed 200% more ads. 200% more ads show = more ad revenue for googl
cult of personality (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems more and more when I try to find something on google all I get are a bunch of link farms. This morning I was trying to find a bike jersey for a friend of mine and on the first page of results, it took getting to the second page to find any actual results. I did much better using Yahoo and found what I was looking for on the first page of results.
I speak of the same experience in another thread. Simple fact is, Google appears to be doing nothing to make searching truely better. I give them some benefit of the doubt by saying "appears" since they may have "the next great thing" in the wings and we just haven't seen it yet. But lets face it, searching today is a time wasting experience. What's worse is that several years ago, it was time wasting due to the large number of seemingly random links. Well, those links aren't so random anymore, AAMOF, those links are geared to simply make Google money. I've said it before and I'll say it again, anyone who buys into their "do no evil" marketing fluff can give me a ring, because I have a nice bridge to sell them. How are they any different that M$ in this regard? They have tons of money, some of the brightest minds in the valley, and yet a simply search for a product gives me pages of utter crap. Hell, if a manufacturer makes the mistake of naming their company after their flagship product, you won't even be able to find their main website in a search until the third page!?! But Google still collects their bucks. How is this helping? How is this not evil?
Anyway, off my soap box. Here's to hoping someone can come along and actually do some good here (and yes, it may even be Google themselves).
Re:cult of personality - antispam search tips.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Big business turned the Internet (the WWW part principaly) into little more than 'online TV'. Because of all the $$$ at stake, we have probably the best search engine around, Google, drowning in ad driven/cash driven search engine spam ('spamdexing').
If you are searching for something in Google, add site:.edu to your search. By doing that. that should lead you to
-
Re:cult of personality - antispam search tips.... (Score:2)
Re:Does google really dominate? (Score:2)
Re:Does google really dominate? (Score:2)
Re:Does google really dominate? (Score:1)
Re:Does google really dominate? (Score:2)
Before this, I worked for Yahoo. Everyone there used Google for their searching; it was just so obvious a choice that no one felt obligated to pretend that anything else was better.
It appears to me... (Score:2)
Kind of like what Yahoo used to look like, where sites that are known to be useful and are actively updated are maintained in some sort of internal database that is updated by Google staff or a non-profit organization.
This site or internal database should be used to inflate the relevance of documents PR/relevance on the trusted domains. The editorial policies of the site might influence these decision.
There could b
Google groups is the killer app for me. (Score:3, Insightful)
And how many slashdotters find Google Groups useful?
Re:Google groups is the killer app for me. (Score:3, Insightful)
Having said that, dejanews had a much better interface. (Simple is good: you'd expect Google to know that).
Re:Google groups is the killer app for me. (Score:2)
Being a developer, I use it quite often at work to find info about software issues and help against assorted quirks that can be more of a jungle to find on the world wild web.
Re:Google groups is the killer app for me. (Score:1)
When I have programming problems or questions, now I actually turn to Google Groups before a standard web search. The results seem to be much more on target since each result is generally a specific issue someone is having. Once you get an on-target post, you just have to wade through all the flame wars, format nazis, and ploinkers...
The groups that actually seem to be hosted by Google are a little easier to read, but less populated.
google cant find me (Score:2, Informative)
Re:google cant find me (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:google cant find me (Score:1)
Ya mean that wasn't the whole idea?
Kris
(who still is damn lucky all the
Re:google cant find me (Score:1)
Re:google cant find me (Score:1)
Re:google cant find me (Score:1)
Re:google cant find me (Score:1)
Re:google cant find me (Score:2, Informative)
Regards,
Steve
Re:google cant find me (Score:1)
Google sucks (Score:4, Interesting)
So basically, I agree with the general position of the article, that there is still a TON (actually several tons) of work to be done and room for someone else to move in with a truely superiour solution. While it's great that Google is tinkering with lots of other technologies, I wish they'd actually make some real advances in their core business (and actually, I'm slowly starting to come to grips with the fact that their core competency may not be searching, but really it's in creating low latency widely distributed computing infrastructures). For all the years and the massive sums of money, my search experience is not significantly better than it was 5 years ago.
Re:Google sucks (Score:1)
There are ways and means to improve the google results. First of all, with google toolbar and personalized google, google actually adapts the search results to your search patterns. So if it sees that you rarely look at the epionons, you will not get them as top results.
Next, use "site:". In many cases, you get much better results if you narrow your search to ".net" or ".org", leaving out the ".com". Refine your search, start with a large number of keywords and only when it do
MS Uses Google :) (Score:3, Interesting)
I was on the phone with some engineers at MS the other day and even they admitted that they use Google. It's just better... for now.
http://religiousfreaks.com/ [religiousfreaks.com]How do they calculate market share? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:How do they calculate market share? (Score:1)
Resting on Laurels (Score:2, Interesting)
So Ask--which used to be called Ask Jeeves but dropped Jeeves, a knowing butler, from its logo in February--is taking a different tack. It has come up with ExpertRank, an algorithm that also ranks web pages by incoming links, but is different from Google's PageRank in that it first groups, or "clusters", pages and links by theme. So instead of using a web page's overall popularity to calculate its ranking, it finds the pages that are most popular among experts on a particular subject, a method that often r
Re:Resting on Laurels (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Resting on Laurels (Score:3, Informative)
Numbers don't match my stats (Score:4, Informative)
The numbers of pagehits by spiders from those search companies are much more on an equal basis. Sometimes one of them is on top, sometimes the other, but they all spider like crazy.
Much more interesting are little search engines like gigabot, which never ever gave me one incoming link but still spider like it's going out of style. Somehow makes me think they must live either off warm air or spam. What reason to be do they have?
Re:Numbers don't match my stats (Score:3, Interesting)
I think your numbers are less representative than most, but even so, I find Google "only" having 50% to be strange. On our site and for June only: Google 75.5%, MSN 11.8%, Yahoo 4%, Kvasir 3.1%, Google (Images) 2%, Altavista 2%, everyone else 0.2% or less.
Since we are based in northern Europe, Kvasir (a Norweigan search engine) is obviously having a much higher share than for most
Re:Numbers don't match my stats (Score:1)
I think this could be explained by the content of your site.
If your site focuses on technology related commentary, java tips, and hardware reviews, I would expect Google to have more links.
If your site contains an aundance of kitten pictures and Christian Fellowship information, I would expect things to be more evenly distributed.
People with no idea what is going on will just use whatever search engine pops up when they get their PC from dell and start it up. People on slashdot (you) probably have pa
The Real Stats (Score:2, Funny)
Not over yet? (Score:2, Interesting)
This isn't over, simply due to lack of certainty in net neutrality. If media companies get leverage to control bandwidth to the big search companies (Google), it goes without saying that that these figures will change significantly. For Google, it could be death by a thousand cuts...
Re:Not over yet? (Score:1)
Not war, market (Score:2, Insightful)
Momentum? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Momentum? (Score:1)
Mornington Crescent.
Can't have a monopoly on the Internet (Score:2)
Search can always be better (as other people have pointed out). This is a good thing. Competition is good and we benefit.
(This is also why Microsoft is so threatened by the Internet... once you move everything to the Internet, t
Re:Can't have a monopoly on the Internet (Score:1)
Re:Can't have a monopoly on the Internet (Score:2)
Noam Chomsky has written a lot about this subject and his books ("Media Control" and "Necessary Illusions" among others) lay out the case clearly.
Some choice quotes:
Re:Can't have a monopoly on the Internet (Score:1)
Re:Can't have a monopoly on the Internet (Score:1)
it is very easy to change search engines
This is only because right now, I can access whatever web site I want to at full speed. If the telcos get their way, I'm pretty sure all the search engines that failed to pay their protection money will start grinding to a halt.
Re:Can't have a monopoly on the Internet (Score:2)
Think about it this way. Once upon a time if you did
Huh? (Score:2)
obligatory SW parody (Score:3, Funny)
Yoda: no, there is another
(later)
Yoda: google... page rank is strong with you... pass on what you have indexed... there... is... another... search engi(ugh)
velocity, acceleration? (Score:2, Funny)
This way you can see how much energy a company has, and thus it's importance (m*v*v/2), growth can end *very* fast.
The energy a company gains is m*a*v, that shows that google is the best growing company...
etc.
E != mav (Score:1)
If you're going to make an analogy of something with classical physics you could at LEAST get the "units"/equations right.
The Google Killer (Score:2)
Re:The Google Killer (Score:2)
You can't use Google Earth at Work (Score:1, Offtopic)
I know I'm a little off-topic, but (from my own slashgeo website [slashgeo.org]):
The Ogle Earth blog indicates that if you use Google Earth at work (the free version), you're in illegality [ogleearth.com]. From the site: "1. USE OF SOFTWARE The Software is made available to you for your personal, non-commercial use only. You may not use the Software or the geographical information made available for display using the Software, or any prints or screen outputs generated with the Software in any commercial or b
Re:You can't use Google Earth at Work (Score:2)
Read the tens of geospatial blogs, they all agree: it is said if you're in a business environment you can't install the software. Simple as this. The links I provided in my original post provide even more links that all confirm what I just told you...
(and no, I'm not happy about this decision either
And yes, I admit, I was off-topic...
Re:You can't use Google Earth at Work (Score:2)
In my first post of this thread, it is specifically specified that those restrictions applies to the free version of Google Earth. So what I said was true. As far as I've been told (but haven't confirmed myself), you do not need the Pro version (400$), the Google Earth Plus version [google.com], which is only 20$, is business-environment friendly. (there's 4 different versions of GE...)
Lets be honest.. (Score:1)
Re:Lets be honest.. (Score:1)
Not true... Google wasn't the first to do maps, video, weather, etc. Google just made a better product. All it takes is someone else with an even better product to make some room in the market.
the climbing ask.com (Score:3, Informative)
Chinks in their armour.. (Score:1)
Look at technorati [technorati.com] for example and look at the effect (or lack of) on technorati traffic when google launched their own blogsearch.. nothing at all.. it failed to make an impression despite technorati having growing pains of its own that probably annoy many users and send them elsewhere. Google tries to apply the same methods used on their main search system to the blog search and its not really working partly because
The competition will never be over (Score:3, Insightful)
The barrier to entry in search is moderately high (you have to be able to afford the hardware to do your indexing) but there will always be people willing to invest in search. It's easily monetized (love that word, eh?), there's no cost for users to switch to new competitive product, and there's no magic bullet that gives you both accurate results and the ability to weed out aggregators and shady SEOs. As long as developers can come up with new search algorithms that give better results, there's the chance that the "next Google" could be launched.
I like and use Google, but that's because the results are usually valuable to me and the ads are minimally intrusive. Currently, the one issue I have is Google's inability to prevent aggregators from showing up in search results. I've never found anything useful through aggregator pages, and I'd like Google to filter them out.
Anyway, the ability of new companies to explore search is something that's good for SE users. New search startups can be launched and attempt to improve search. Google is forced to innovate. Where's the downside?
Re:The competition will never be over (Score:2)
You don't see it because you don't hate free markets. Some people do.
Show me a better search engine than Google and I'll use it. That's what got me off of altavista.digital.com over to google.stanford.edu. I think some Slashdotter mentioned it.
Where is my 'remove this site' button? (Score:4, Informative)
Sadly, this button is now gone from Personalized Search, and the resultspammer sites are steadily reducing Google's usefulness to me. Where I could once search for specific tech terms and get a good batch of reference resources, now I'm getting junk portal pages for the top five results.
Sure, I could report [google.com] a link as spam, but that's a lot more time-consuming than the button, and it doesn't appear to have any immediate results for my searches.
This makes me sad. I've loved Google since I first met her, but I can't be with her if she's going to continue mainlining spam.
Re:Where is my 'remove this site' button? (Score:1)
Why Google? (Score:2, Interesting)
To me, I think the future of search isn't necessarily a better Google, but something different
The issue of trust (Score:2)
Google's motto of "Do no evil" is really just a modernized version of "Hones
The Position of Power (Score:1)
The Real Un-Google (Score:1)
Article totally ignores emerging fields of LRS (Last Result Search) and SEdO (Search Engine de-Optimization).
But then what do you expect of The Economist? Typical center-right-wing media bias.
Google's search (Score:2)
The bigger they are, the harder they fall (Score:1)
There is no Yahoo (Score:2)
The fact is that Yahoo has never had a viable search product. They started out as a shared bookmark file, then became a directory web site. It was never the best way to search the web — the w
Re:There is no Yahoo (Score:2)
Re:There is no Yahoo (Score:2)
What settled it for me was that if you click on a "cached" link you go to a page that looks very much like a Google cache page. But the IP number definitely belongs to Yahoo.
Re:There is no Yahoo (Score:2)
Marketing dudes with physics skills? (Score:2)
Midwest... (Score:2)
That rules out much of the midwest except for the areas around Chicago and Denver.
Re:The next one shuns Ivory/Ivy elitism. (Score:2)
> and other things in here as well? Or is it that you're just too busy with writing offshoring loophole law?
I admire your patriotism, but this is just sour grapes. Look, I'm formerly from the midwest - now on the west coast, and the truth is that you simply can't attract young, active people with flat, land-locked ground covered with crappy weather. They'll pay extra to live where you can have fun