Without the power of the search engines, World Wide Web or Internet would not have been so overwhelming that it is today. Google is the leader in this art and science right from its inception around 1998. Even with a market capitalization of 143 billion dollars and fingers in every pie of Internet business, it has not changed the feel and look of their search engine origins and rightly so. Many start-ups and established players have tried to replicate (or catch up) the success of Google but Google has stayed ahead of competition by constantly improving their search engine algorithms, resulting in fading away of most of its competitors like AltaVista ,All the web, Lycos,Excite and so on. Only Yahoo and MSN have stayed afloat largely because of their overpowering presence in other areas of Internet business.
All this has neither discouraged nor dissuaded start-ups from attempting to replicate the Google model of success, which is building their product around a powerful search engine. From 2004 onwards, venture capitalists have invested nearly $350 million into 79 odd start-ups that have something to do with Internet search.
Definitely the market for search engines is huge and some serious competition to the established three; Google, Yahoo and MSN will do more good than bad. There is room for improvement in both the core search that is the accuracy and context of a single query and the aggregate information about search indexes, results, and queries across time. I am sure somebody is going to come up with something better soon than later, it just a matter of time when some novel idea strikes to one of thousands of engines working on it.
One of the most talked about start-up is Powerset which was featured in New York Times few days ago. All the best to guys at Powerset and others, let us keep this search to search engines going.
www.powerset.com
Trivia: Opinions are a powerful force that can create or destroy your reputation.
No comments:
Post a Comment