For the last few years, like many web users, I’ve felt that search was solved. Google filled all my needs in ways that Altavista, Lycos and Yahoo never had. The statistics support that feeling: Google now has 63.5% market share in search and through its AdWords and AdSense programs it has developed a staggering money machine.
But nothing in technology lasts for long. Just as Google supplanted others, one day something will supplant Google. Google, of course, is determined that Google will provide its own successor – there are plenty of brilliant engineers in the Googleplex working precisely to that end. Even the most nimble company, however, has a hard time replacing its own most successful products. Harvard Business School professor Clay Christensen’s book on the problem, The Innovator’s Dilemma, is one of the mandatory texts for every Silicon Valley executive. Change is far more likely, Christensen shows, to come from unexpected places.
Redmond, Washington, would certainly count as unexpected these days. It’s hard to recall that Microsoft was once feared in Silicon Valley for its power to make or break companies. For all its wealth and high expenditure on r&d, Microsoft has gone years without anything dramatically new. Sure, there have been minor wonders like the WorldWide Telescope (turns your computer into a virtual telescope) and Photosynth (makes three-dimensional photo montages), but they aren’t changing the world.
Bing won’t either. It’s Microsoft’s new search engine. Silicon Valley wags reckon the name stands for But It’s Not Google. That’s unfair, but it’s certainly hard to see many users replacing Google with Bing as their first choice for search. What might happen, however, is that Bing could develop a reputation for excellence in particularly areas of search, and claw back a bit of ground from Google. Take travel. Query Bing with “San Francisco New York” and it assumes you’re looking for flights. The first result provides me with a $249 fare and the prediction that fares are holding steady. That’s useful. Google isn’t quite as clever (yet).
A more radical approach to search has been taken by the eccentric computer scientist Stephen Wolfram. His software program Mathematica was once described as being to mathematics what word processing is to writing. He and his team have taken the same computational approach to search and created Wolfram Alpha. Unlike Google or Bing, which index as much of the web as they can, Wolfram Alpha searches a database that the Wolfram Research team has compiled. Results aren’t sullied (or improved) by the wisdom or wildness of crowds. For some things, results are amazing. Have a calculation to do? Unhesitatingly use Wolfram Alpha.
The likely next innovation in search is real-time search. If I want to search for something happening right now, Google doesn’t help me much. Part of the excitement around Twitter is that it’s entirely about right now. Users can find out about a plane landing in the Hudson or a new analysis of healthcare reform just as it’s happening or being released. Google co-founder Larry Page understands the need. At the Google Zeitgeist conference in London recently, he admitted, “We’ve done a relatively poor job of creating things that work on a per second basis… People really want to do stuff in real-time and they [Twitter] have done a great job about it… We will do a good job of things now we have these examples.”
Why do these niche products matter? These new entrants to search, whether from giants like Microsoft or upstarts like Wolfram, will force innovation in search. Without them, Google could easily rest on their market dominance, making occasional tweaks (like testing 41 different shades of blue to see which performed better on their home page). Bing, Wolfram and others will make sure that the Google guys remain restless, and that other innovators keep tinkering with new approaches to search. Which is good for all of us.
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