Nutter on the Future of Search
October 22, 2008
Blaise Nutter’s “Three Companies That Will Change How We Search” here offers an interesting view of three vendors who are competing with Google. The premise of the article is that there is room for search innovation. The five page write up profiles and analyzes Blinkx (video search spin out from some folks at Autonomy), Mahalo (journalist turned search entrepreneur Jason Calcanis), and Cuil (Anna Patterson and assorted wizards from Google, IBM, and elsewhere). As I understand the analysis, the hook is different for each company; for example:
- Blinkx. Indexes the content in the video, not just be metadata, for 26 million videos
- Mahalo. Community search engine with humans not software doing the picking of results
- Cuil. A big index with a magazine style layout.
The conclusion of the article is that innovation is possible and that each of these sites does a better job of addressing user privacy.
For me, the most interesting comment in the write up was this comment:
David and Goliath fought on a level battlefield, but Google doesn’t.
My view on each of these search systems is a bit different from Mr. Nutter’s. I do agree that Google presents a large challenge to search start ups. In fact, until a competitor can leap frog Google, I doubt that users will change their surfing behavior regardless of Google’s policy regarding privacy. Google monitors to make money. Money is needed to scale and provide “free” search.
This brings me to the difference between Mr. Nutter’s analysis and mine. First, for any of these services to challenge Google in a meaningful way, the companies are going to need cash, lots of cash. In today’s economic climate, I think that these firms can get some money, but the question is, “Will it be enough if Google introduces substantially similar features?” Second, each of these services, according to Mr. Nutter, offers features Google doesn’t provide. I don’t agree. Google is indexing content of videos and audios. In fact I wrote about a patent application that suggests Google is gearing up for more services in this area here. Google is essentially social, which is a big chunk of the notion of user clicks. The “ig” or individualized Google offers a magazine style layout if you configure the new “ig” interface to do it. It’s not Cuil, but it’s in the ballpark.
For me, the question is, “What services are implementing technology that has the potential to leap frog Google as Google jumped ahead of AltaVista.com, MSN.com, and Yahoo.com in 1998? In my opinion it’s none of these three services profiled by Mr. Nutter. “Let many flowers bloom”. But these have to be of hearty stock, have the proper climate, and plenty of nurturing. None of these three services is out of the greenhouse and into the real world, and I think their survival has to be proven, not assumed. Search innovations are often in the eye of the beholder, not in the code of the vendor.
Stephen Arnold, October 20, 2008
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