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The engines of dominance and some issues

Even if Microsoft swallows Yahoo, the new group will be a minnow.

London: Behind Microsoft’s attempt to buy Yahoo lies the extraordinary influence that Internet searches wield in the daily lives of a large number of people today, from finding a restaurant to writing a PhD. Quite likely, the improvement in examination results is simply down to the fact that almost all human knowledge can be gleaned from a search engine.

A survey by the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) found that between 2005 and 2007, the proportion of people who went online for health information rose from 36 per cent to 70 per cent. William Dutton, the Director of the OII, claims that people in the U.K. are now using websites rather than the country’s health service for information. He says: “People are going to their doctor with a ringbinder of stuff from the internet. This is extremely positive.”

Google, barely 10 years old, is top dog with a global market share of 62 per cent and the lion’s share of the El Dorado of contextual advertising that goes with it. Even if Microsoft swallows Yahoo, the new group will be a minnow. But this outward strength hides the hundreds of other search engines aiming for a slice of the action as new, and deeper, ways of search unfold, particularly for the estimated 75 per cent of the potential Internet not yet mined.

Google’s pre-eminence is puzzling in that it does not advertise yet is one of the strongest brands in the world purely by word of mouth. It has no physical assets, just search algorithms. Unlike Microsoft’s 90 per cent-plus monopoly of personal computer operating systems, spreadsheets and word processing — which it would take corporations years to extract themselves from — people could drop Google in 10 seconds flat by switching to a better engine if one came along. Google’s pioneering algorithms — ranking Web pages by the quantity and quality of links attached to them — made it pre-eminent, but others have caught up. It is not easy to pick out Google’s results from, say, those of Yahoo. Google’s strength as a generic search engine — keying in any inquiry about anything at all — could also be its Achilles heel if the proliferation of specialist or “vertical” sites for cars, real estate, health, accommodation or even diamonds succeeds. If you search Google for a job in one place it would not know of something 25 km away that a vertical engine such as SimplyHired.com or Indeed.com does using personal details.

Second, there are search engines relying on contributions by people, not algorithms — the most recent being wikia.com. It has been criticised but it is early days and has Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikipedia, behind it. Another one, silobreaker.com, claims to search as people do using context and images. Third, there are semantic search engines — such as hakia.com, garlik.com and even ask.com — in which authors help decide keywords, or metadata, to be indexed by search engines.

Fourth, demographic engines such as circos.com (U.S. only) enable search inquiries based on geographic and personal preferences (for example, “affordable, romantic, ambient restaurant in Denver with spa”).

Personalised search is today the holy grail for advertisers. The way people are emptying their lives into Facebook enables search engines to find, say, a 24-year-old man living in south London interested in Amy Winehouse, who is in a recently ended relationship.

Google knows all this and has its own plans. And nothing is more important than mobiles, because a billion phones a year are sold and search will migrate to this space where Yahoo and Microsoft are strong.

People use Google because it is a trusted brand. But it knows more about us than all the intelligence agencies and private detective agencies in the world. The more it acts like a monopoly, the more it could lose that trust. Google’s biggest rival is still itself. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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The engines of dominance and some issues

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