Alex Iskold writes, and Richard Macmanus edits, a great article on “The Race to Beat Google.” They reference Emre Sokullu’s earlier post that breaks down the Search arms race in three areas:
- Better Technology
- Better User Interface
- Vertical Search
Here’s their chart on the competitors for Google’s lunch:
The NY Times article “In Silicon Valley, the Race Is On to Trump Google” reveals some interesting statistics on how much it costs to capitalize a search engine company:
Since the beginning of 2004, venture capitalists have put nearly $350 million into no fewer than 79 start-ups that had something to do with Internet search, according to the National Venture Capital Association, an industry group.
That works out to an average $4.4 million per company, though it’s safe to say that the bar for entering the search space is raising higher (computer scientists and servers and bandwidth are not cheap), and recent capital rounds for search contenders are definitely higher than $4 million.
The one company that I see more and more often these days is Snap. They’ve built a search engine that allows users to hover their cursor over a link in the search results page and see a preview of the site behind that link through an Ajax callout.
In addition, they’re doing a great job of using blogs to get the word out on their technology - not through begging people to write reviews, but by releasing a tool that bloggers can install on their site to enable this “preview” capability for all the links on their blogs.
I haven’t decided whether to install that plug-in to my Wordpress blog, but you can click on this link to Andrew Parker’s blog “The Gong Show,” where he has the Snap preview tool enabled to see how it works.
It’s interesting, as you can see some cool AJAX animation of the site behind the link, but the size is small and the resolution limited so it’s not like you can read the text. So, it remains to be seen whether that “preview” functionality is just a “cool” feature, or whether it gets enough user adoption to make the search user base meaningful and attractive for marketers to bid on keyword advertising.
2 responses so far ↓
Jonah // Jan 3, 2007 at 10:43 pm
I’ve been meaning to post on this one myself. Snap is in its first inning, they are succeeding because they are offering real value to users and not just “a better algorithm.” IMO investing in/working on a better algorithm for search right now is comparable to building a better operating system in, say, 2000. Sure, it was crying out to be done, with Windows Millenium a poorly executed patch and decent amounts of anti-softie FUD flying around, but it didn’t happen b/c MSFT was at the height of their powers and even with that snafu they looked impregnable. Google is probably in or entering it’s “Windows 3.0″ phase now, so there’s likely a good decade of GOOG domination to come. Smart companies like Snap are innovating away from the algorithm and making the promises of web2.0 come true. I didn’t add the snap code to my site until I was surfing around one day and realized how often I wanted to see a Google Maps preview anytime I moused over the name of a mappable place, and how Snap was the company innovating in that direction. I see them joining forces with GOOG or (hopefully) remaining independent as the Apple/NeXT to Google’s “Microsoft-opoly” on search. :)
Andrew Parker // Jan 5, 2007 at 4:48 am
Thanks for the feedback on the widget. I’m still unsure of it’s value too. Sometimes its more trouble than it’s worth, especially when the popup blocks something else that you actually want to read.
I’m not sure what Snap gets out of it. I guess it’s free brand advertising for them, but I can’t imagine that the little benefit of brand advertising is really worth the hosting costs of storing and serving all those images no matter how grainy they are.
But, hey, I’m not complaining. Regardless of whether they can make the Snap Preview feature economical for them, I’m happy to use it as long as it stays free (and free of ads).
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