An interesting battle in early 2007: Who will take down Google?

A fierce battle to bring down the 'king of search' Google is being implemented and almost every opponent is confident of being able to win the Google throne.

The first search engine to be mentioned is Powerset by the trio including Dr. Barney Pell (general manager), Steve Newcomb (production manager) and Lorenzo Thione (product design). According to the biography on the Powerset website (powerset.com/team.html), Barney Pell earned a Ph.D. in computer science from Cambridge University in 1993, once famous in the field of artificial intelligence with products provided for US Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Exploding the search engine war

Steve Newcomb is an expert in online communication. And Lorenzo Thione (Italian, master of software engineering, graduated from University of Texas - Austin) is a computer language expert who worked at CommerceNet and Fuji - Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory. Powerset project is being invested by many Silicon Valley investors.

Powerset is not the only potential rival of Google. Also Yahoo, Microsoft and some new faces ChaCha.com or Snap.com. In the week of December 2006, the founder of the online dictionary website Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, also announced the launch of Wikiasari search engine in early 2007. Wikiasari produces 'community' results, This allows users to edit search results, similar to the way Wikipedia has long applied. Wikiasari also allows users to 'personalize' search results.

With the huge information store available from Wikipedia, Wikiasari is definitely more convenient to arrange links and search results as you wish. This is truly the most formidable opponent for a stunned Google. Erika Morphi in the article on LinuxInsider.com (of ECT News Network) believes that Wikiasari will be Google's killer. One of the advantages of Wikipedia is that their existing brand name, a familiar and reputable name is always more welcoming than a stranger (like Powerset).

The battle for search engines (the US $ 7 billion market alone in the US) is creating new vitality for Silicon Valley and energizing the next wave of Internet boom. It also shows that virtual space is constantly evolving. According to the New York Times, since 2004, investors have spent nearly $ 350 million on search engine development projects with no fewer than 79 newly established companies.

Jimmy Wales: 'Wikiasari will eat off Google!'

They focus on areas that Google has not yet developed or not strong, such as searching for animations (videos), blogs or specialized information (such as medical specialties). With Powerset, they recently received $ 12.5 million in investments; Hakia received $ 16 million; The $ 16 million Snap and ChaCha (using paid researchers as collaborators to answer questions from users) receive $ 6.1 million.

However, in dozens of search engines that have been around for the past few years, no company has accounted for more than 1% of the US search market share in December 2006 - as noted by Nielsen NetRatings. Consider the case of A9 - the search engine owned by Amazon.com, which received many positive comments when it came out in 2004 under the direction of Udi Manber, who is considered one of the experts. The world's leading search math.

However, A9 gradually disappeared into the vast Internet world and now Udi Manber is working for Google as vice president! Undeterred, Jeffrey P. Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, is investing in search engine ChaCha. According to the Indianapolis Star (January 1, 2007), ChaCha.com is increasing its traffic. With this kind of popular information, ChaCha does not charge but with special information, users have to pay 5-10 USD / search. This approach is similar to Google Answers (now deleted); Live QnA of Microsoft or Yahoo! Answers.

Please open brackets, Google Answers pays for the researcher to answer and also asks the user to pay; Yahoo! Answers and Live QnA allow users to ask anything and the answers are free to work by collaborators. Whoever answers the best will be voted by the user as a quality scoring form. Recently, Yahoo announced that Ed Cook (a resident of Indianapolis) is one of their 25 best answerers (as of November 2006, Yahoo! Answers has 16.6 million users).

So far, Google is still No. 1. As of September 30, 2006, Google has 9,378 full-time employees and according to Nielsen NetRatings, Google accounts for 54% of the search market share (compared to 23% of Yahoo! 13% of Windows Live Search) with about 1 billion searches per day. Currently having revenue of 10 billion USD / year and worth about 125 billion USD, Google develops continuously.

Three of Powerset's founders (from left: Steve Newcomb, Lorenzo Thione and Barney Pell)

In January 2006, they announced the purchase of dMarc Radio Advertising Company; In late 2006, they bought YouTube's online video website for $ 1.65 billion. In addition to working with NASA, Google also partnered with America Online (of Time Warner Group) to provide video search services; as well as with Fox Interactive Media (News Corp). However, Google also began to show signs of crisis. In the reportage on Fortune

(October 2, 2006), author Adam Lashinsky shows a completely different Google: chaotic, disorganized development, unstable future . According to Sheryl Sandberg (37 years old, vice president responsible for the system) Google's advertising system), the company is witnessing ' bad decisions, acting too fast, uncontrollably, wasting money '. Sandberg realized this fact when he made a serious mistake and went to see Larry Page (Google co-founder) but was surprised by the comment: ' I'm glad you're wrong '! A mistake that costs millions of dollars cannot be judged by the same attitude.

And Google shares are also stalling. According to stock market experts, this stalling phenomenon is the clearest evidence that Google is having problems. Encouraging all engineers to spend 20% of their time pursuing their own ideas, Google is constantly launching new products.

As of October 2006, Google has launched at least 83 complete products or still in the testing phase; And what is remarkable is that none of these products change the face of the online world in the same way Google.com did. Sub-products such as Picasa photo, Google Finance or Google Blog Search website were not successful and even many technical errors .

However, whether Google is down or not, the search engine market is still booming. ' You don't need to rise to the # 1 position to be worth billions of dollars' - commented by Allen Morgan, partner at Mayfield Fund (the company that invested $ 10 million in Snap search engine), showed that Search engine market share is still very large, potential and just occupying a small corner of the pie can also 'eat enough'. "

Manh Kim