Building a Competitive Search Market

Michael Arrington of Techcrunch kicked off a very good discussion with his post on the importance of competition in the search space. Although some are suggesting that it might be time to just cede the market to Google and tackle other usability issues, we think otherwise. Beating Google at the following scenarios - Long Tail of search game (within the last 36 hours, on 1 out of 100,000,000,000 web pages someone posted - william fischer thought folks were a little too harsh on the leotard - find it ) or contextual ad serving game (william fischer opened an email that mentioned a flight to salt lake city let’s serve him an ad for lift tickets for Snowbird) or the needle in haystack (500,000 sites mention gelato and rome but let’s find william the one that mentions that spot near the Pantheon) is no small feat. Taking Google head-on would require massive capital investment and massive ad inventories to effectively monetize it. Very few organizations have the capital (intellectual and financial) and infrastructure to get any short-term traction in this fight. Fortunately, as a business, most of google’s ad revenues are derived from areas where there is head room to improve the user experience for both advertisers and end users. Retail (entertainment, consumer electronics, soft goods, etc.), classified (recruitment, autos, services, resell), travel and insurance make-up over 80% of Google ad revenues and yet, I don’t believe, that Google offers the best user experience in any of those categories. As an advertiser, Google offers ease of use, great campaign management tools, the ability to deliver meaningful volume, and an ROI that is competitive. But, in each of those dimensions, the experience can be improved. Even in Long Tail areas, with smart specialization and the development of better semantic tools, Google will start to become more vulnerable over time. With the development of walled gardens and distributed search/browsing tools, more vulnerabilities will be exposed. It’s too early to cede this market to a single player.

William Fischerworkhound.co.ukblog.workhound.co.uktwitter.com/wmfischer