Tuesday, March 23, 2004
Search Wars
Newsweek is reporting that competitors to Google are gearing up for war. Believe it or not, search engines like Google represent a 4 billion dollar (US) annual take, with Google accounting for 1 billion of that. The company was begun by two Stanford grad students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin a few short years ago, in a burgeoning Internet environment that included Alta-Vista, Ask Jeeves, Lycos and Yahoo. Now Google stands high above its competition, where ever single minute of the day, over 138,000 pages are searched for, in 90 different languages. The Newsweek article carries the euphoria of being on top for Page and Brin to reality, as more competitors are gearing up for a run at Google.
Here at Southstation.Org, the content of this blog and the public sites of Southstation.Org are searched every twenty-four hours by more than twenty different search engines. Some are regional, some obscure, some in beta mode, and others cloaking some unknown source. All this adds up to bandwidth that could potentially block out visitors to this site, so I am concerned about the plethora of search vehicles too. I've been in discussions with my hosting company to ban some well-known troublesome search engines that blindly suck down a web site and ignore the rules that are standards in the industry.
Newsweek, reporting that "Not only has Google very famously become a verb, but Silicon Valley is holding its collective breath for the seemingly inevitable IPO, when Google will become a synonym for another word: wealthy. Still, even without a market cap, the two Google guys recently made the Forbes billionaire list." Pretty good for 30 and 31-year old guys. Now, Google will have to begin differentiating itself from unknown competition to stay out in front.
Search engines are the front door to the internet. And businesses and organizations that are not indexed are invisible to consumers and users. Having a high "page rank" (calculated from the number of times that link has been clicked in a search list for a searched term) guarantees prominent placement and potential revenue. Though there have been renegade folks who try to manipulate the "click-throughs" to push page rank and the site further up the list, Google constantly tweaks the algorithm to prevent such maniplulation. But it seems that the page ranking is the center of the potential revenue stream for the new start ups. Google does a bit of this with its "Ad-Words," pushing supposedly relevant advertising as sidebars to a search.
What does this mean to the average consumer? More television and radio advertising for search engines to drive people to the internet to try the new guys out. More affinity deals with commercial web sites, promoting the Google competition. More searches across the internet, driving up bandwidth. and cost. So it may cost me more to have Google experience competition. Hmmmm.
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Here at Southstation.Org, the content of this blog and the public sites of Southstation.Org are searched every twenty-four hours by more than twenty different search engines. Some are regional, some obscure, some in beta mode, and others cloaking some unknown source. All this adds up to bandwidth that could potentially block out visitors to this site, so I am concerned about the plethora of search vehicles too. I've been in discussions with my hosting company to ban some well-known troublesome search engines that blindly suck down a web site and ignore the rules that are standards in the industry.
Newsweek, reporting that "Not only has Google very famously become a verb, but Silicon Valley is holding its collective breath for the seemingly inevitable IPO, when Google will become a synonym for another word: wealthy. Still, even without a market cap, the two Google guys recently made the Forbes billionaire list." Pretty good for 30 and 31-year old guys. Now, Google will have to begin differentiating itself from unknown competition to stay out in front.
Search engines are the front door to the internet. And businesses and organizations that are not indexed are invisible to consumers and users. Having a high "page rank" (calculated from the number of times that link has been clicked in a search list for a searched term) guarantees prominent placement and potential revenue. Though there have been renegade folks who try to manipulate the "click-throughs" to push page rank and the site further up the list, Google constantly tweaks the algorithm to prevent such maniplulation. But it seems that the page ranking is the center of the potential revenue stream for the new start ups. Google does a bit of this with its "Ad-Words," pushing supposedly relevant advertising as sidebars to a search.
What does this mean to the average consumer? More television and radio advertising for search engines to drive people to the internet to try the new guys out. More affinity deals with commercial web sites, promoting the Google competition. More searches across the internet, driving up bandwidth. and cost. So it may cost me more to have Google experience competition. Hmmmm.
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