StanleyWong.org

I just read Rick Skrenta’s great blog post,
“Winner-Take-All: Google and the Third Age of Computing”

Rick is right on the money with a lot of his observations, especially the fact that Google has built their huge lead on the backs of the Search and Advertising dominance.

One thing I’d like to add is zero switching costs also has a downside for Google if a new entrant is **significantly better** than the incumbent. So far, the efforts of Yahoo!, Ask, and Microsoft in the search space are building on essentially the same technology platform as Google. The best they can do is incrementally better than Google and therefore have a huge challenge to overcome the brand gap and technology refinement from Google’s band of top notched engineers.

Significantly better requires one to make a dramatic leap (technology or business model) beyond what Google is doing today. When Google came into the market they introduced PageRank (link based algorithm) which was significantly better than the prevailing keyword based ranking technologies employed by the incumbents (AltaVista, Excite, Infoseek, Inktomi, etc). PageRank introduced, for that time, a relatively SPAM free search environment that plagued the keyword based search engines. So for users comparing searches performed on Google vs. the incumbents the results were startling.
The biggest challenge for search continues to be search SPAM. SEO practitioners (white hat and black hat) have continued to arm themselves with tools to SPAM the current generation of search engines. These tools include keyword based semantic page generators (using Markov chain models) while linking them together into artificially generated networks to improve ranking.

Having worked in the Internet space for over 10 years, I personally think that Google is not invincible. I’ve seen too many dominant players come and go during my career to be bold enough to make that claim. However for the potential competitors, it requires one to have a talented team that can approach this space from a completely different vantage point and offer up a new technology paradigm to advance the state of the art towards the next generation. This requires a healthy combination of Smarts (Innovation) + Money (to Scale the business) + Flawless Execution to achieve.

Filed by SWong at 8:55 pm under Search