Searching beyond Google (Part 1)
Jeremi Karnell, CMO & Founder | One to One Interactive
March 31, 2004
Introduction
In 1995, it was Yahoo!. 1997 Inktomi. 1999 AltaVista. Today, Google
sits on the throne of the Internet Search Engine market. It would
be hard for most (from the average consumer to the sophisticated
online marketer) to think of a world without Google. In fact, with
all of the hype surrounding Google these days, one would think that
it is responsible for creating the entire search engine space. But
as market demand grows, so does innovation and competition. "You
never know in the search business when there is somebody down the
street that's going to make you look like yesterday’s news," states
Whit Andrews, Research Director at Gartner. Indeed, Google's claim
to fame — the ability of its search engine algorithms to find the
most relevant results, based on their popularity — may be growing
stale[i]. This is the first in a two-part series that will examine
what new players, old players, and "the player" (Microsoft) are
currently doing to shake up the search landscape and claim their
stake in the gold rush of this popular internet marketing channel.
New Players
There is no question that search is big business today. The
"secret sauce" of any major search player is their algorithm, the
engine that drives how search results are displayed based on
specific rules. This is exactly where new players are focusing to
establish a point of differentiation between what they have to
offer over established players.
KartOO
(http://www.kartoo.com/)
KartOO, based in Clermont-Ferrand, France, is a visual meta
search engine that allows users to search for information from
numerous sources (web sites, intranets, databases, professional
applications, ERP systems) and displays the results within an
interactive and unique cartographic interface. Instead of
displaying a list of links, in ranked order, it displays the
results of a given search in a graphical, networked format (via
Macromedia Flash). Nodes are linked to each other by common
terms, which you can add and remove to further restrict the
search graphically. The links between the nodes are color coded,
allowing you to easily see how terms relate to different sites,
and nodes are displayed by size, according to relevance to the
search term.
Mooter
(http://www.mooter.com/)
An Australian company who has taken principles from
psychology, software, and neural networks to create a ranking
algorithm that learns from users as a search progresses. Before
dumping a long list of links on a user, Mooter analyzes the
potential meaning and permutations of the starting
keywords/phrase and, ranks the relevancy of resulting web pages
in within broad categories called clusters. To develop a more
precise understanding of what the user is probably looking for,
the Mooter engine notes which clusters and links get clicked and
uses that information to improve future search results.
Dipsie
(http://www.dipsie.com/)
Based in Chicago, IL, Dipsie's mission is to go beyond the 1%
of the web that Google and Teoma index and provide users access
to the petabytes of data available in the "deep web" (web content
that search spiders normally have a difficult time indexing such
as dynamic/database driven product catalogs or archives) — all
within 2 clicks. By utilizing a proprietary crawler to index
almost everything on the web, with the exception of any pages
that require authentication with a username/password, Dipsie
plans to launch this summer with an index of 10 billion documents
(triple the size of Google's index).
Old Players
Lest there be any doubt, existing portals and search engines are
not sitting on the sidelines when it comes to the cut throat game
of search marketing. Indeed, the last 2 years have witnessed a
buying spree by know brands such as Yahoo! & AskJeeves, in an
attempt to bolster their own search assets and increase their
market share and margins on search revenue opportunities.
Yahoo!
Between 2002 and 2003 Yahoo! acquired Inktomi, Overture,
AltaVista, Alltheweb.com, and FAST in deals totaling over a
billion dollars, to further its quest to overtake Google as the
Web's most popular search engine. On February 18, 2004, Yahoo!
launched its first salvo against Google by dropping its
technology as their primary search results in favor of their own.
The loss of Yahoo! could eventually cost Google its majority
share of the search market. According to a comScore qSearch
compilation, Google's Yahoo! business represented a 25.9% market
share of the search market in October 2003.
Powering Yahoo's search is a new algorithm called
"Webrank", positioned to compete head-to-head with Google's
"Pagerank" technology. Whereas Google's Pagerank is a measure of
link popularity, Webrank is primarily based on Web surfer traffic
(i.e., Alexa) driven by data submitted from users who have the
newest version of Yahoo! Companion Toolbar with the advanced
features turned on.
Finally, Yahoo's consolidations has positioned it has the
sole search partner powering MSN's results (for now). In a
separate, but possibly related move, MSN's decision to drop
Looksmart has positioned Yahoo! as the only marquee brand in the
marketplace providing paid inclusion services, a growing market
estimated to total $3 billion by 2007.
AskJeeves
Ask Jeeves initially gained fame in 1998 and 1999 by
being the "natural language" search engine, allowing users to ask
questions and then returning what seemed to be the right answer
to everything. In reality, technology wasn't what made Ask Jeeves
perform so well. Behind the scenes, the company at one point had
about 100 editors who monitored search logs. They then went out
onto the web and located what seemed to be the best sites to
match the most popular queries[ii]. That changed when Ask Jeeves
acquired Teoma in 2001.
Teoma's page rank algorithm is an authority-based ranking
system. Its bid to outmaneuver Google focuses not on a page’s
singular popularity. Instead, Teoma recognizes that links cluster
around certain subjects and themes, very much like communities.
For instance pages on "Scuba Diving" don't simply link upwards to
more popular pages; they also tend to link to each other, forming
circles around prominent sites. Before Teoma presents results for
a given query, it identifies the associated communities and looks
for the "authorities" within them. It then ranks pages according
to how often each page is cited by authority pages.
In a move to remain a player in the search marketing space
amongst major consolidations, last month Ask Jeeves announced
their acquisition of Interactive Search Holdings for $343
million. Interactive Search holdings, whose properties and
subsidiaries include My Way, My Search, My Web Search, iWon,
Excite and MaxOnline, is one of the largest online search and
media companies in the world. Founded in October 1999,
Interactive Search Holdings is a comScore Media Metrix Top Ten
Web Property. Upon the closing of this acquisition, Ask Jeeves
anticipates combined company revenues of approximately $220 to
$230 million.
Conclusion
It remains to be seen if any of these new or old players will be
able to grow their business to a level that will begin to threaten
Google's 200 million requests a day. In addition, with 2003
revenues estimated roughly at $900 million (620% growth over 2002)
and an impending IPO that is hyped to be as big or bigger than
Intel's, Apple's, or Netscape's, Google does not plan to rest on
its laurels. Reinvestment into R&D remains a singular focus for
Google, maintaining an army of hundreds of researchers, including
more then 60 PhDs, to sit on the front lines of the search wars.
The firm has recently introduced local search and plans to extend
their technology into mobile phones, e-mail application, and social
networks … to name a just a few of the things to come.
Such weapons may hold off the likes of Mooter and Yahoo! in
individual battles for the search dominence. However, they pale in
comparison to the current efforts of Microsoft, who decidedly plans
to win the war in this space. Stay tuned for
Part
2 in One to One's "Searching Beyond Google" to get a peek
inside Microsoft's play to "Netscape" Google.
[i] "MIT Technology Review". Pg. 36 March 2004 Issue
[ii]
http://searchenginewatch.com/links/article.php/2156221
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