Analysts: Google Spreading Itself Too Thin
By Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service
A few excerpts:“As Google enters its second decade of existence with no apparent rivals for the search-king throne, industry observers warn that the company’s biggest enemy may be itself…it has to devote effort and resources to maintaining a host of non-search services that could potentially distract the company…there is no shortage of competitors constantly trying to create a better mousetrap and capture Google’s search users…
Some like Hakia and Microsoft’s Powerset are betting on their semantic search engines, which don’t use conventional keyword technology like Google’s, and instead attempt to understand the meaning of Web pages. Others like Mahalo and Wikia Search maintain that they will provide a better search engine by involving people in the process of building their indexes and ranking their results. Still other search engines like Ixquick and Clusty hope to attract users by offering them more privacy than Google and not keeping records of things like their IP addresses and query terms. And there are specialists in specific search segments, like Blinkx, which focuses on video search, an area of increased interest as online video’s popularity rises globally. In all cases, the strategy is the same: identify a perceived Google shortcoming and try to improve on it.”
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September 8th, 2008 at 3:52 am
Wrong. Google doesn’t use “conventional” keyword search - they’ve been in the process of “semantic indexing” for more than a year already (see the patent here)
Google can now be defined as
You can type anything in Google, including “questions” and still get better results than you currently get with Powerset and hakia. Whatever algorithms they have, they most be similar with the ones patented by Google (see link above). There is no way to “understand web pages” without understanding the words and the relationships between them.
Google doesn’t call its search engine semantic because it doesn’t need to. They believe in social search instead and this is their future approach. The non-search services operated by Google will not distract the company… many are still search and marketing related anyway. They are PR and branding tools that help Google maintain its supremacy in all possible fields. Google controls the niches it needs to consolidate its empire. I think these “analysts” are ignoring the obvious.