What “viable search engine competition” really looks like by Alex Clemmer.
From the post:
Hacker News is up in arms again today about the RapGenius fiasco. See RapGenius statement and HN comments. One response article argues that we need more “viable search engine competition” and the HN community largely seems to agree.
In much of the discussion, there is a picaresque notion that the “search engine problem” is really just a product problem, and that if we try really hard to think of good features, we can defeat the giant.
I work at Microsoft. Competing with Google is hard work. I’m going to point out some of the lessons I’ve learned along the way, to help all you spry young entrepreneurs who might want to enter the market.
Alex has six (6) lessons for would-be Google killers:
Lesson 1: The problem is not only hiring smart people, but hiring enough smart people.
Lesson 2: competing on market share is possible; relevance is much harder
Lesson 3: social may pose an existential threat to Google’s style of search
Lesson 4: large companies have access to technology that is often categorically better than OSS state of the art
Lesson 5: large companies are necessarily limited by their previous investments
Lesson 6: large companies have much more data than you, and their approach to search is sophisticated
See Alex’s post for the details under each lesson.
What has always puzzled me is why compete on general search? General search services are “free” save for the cost of a users time to mine the results. It is hard to think of a good economic model to compete with “free.” Yes?
If we are talking about medical, legal, technical, engineering search, where services are sold to professionals and the cost is passed onto consumers, that could be a different story. Even there, costs have to be offset by a reasonable expectation of profit against established players in each of those markets.
One strategy would be to supplement or enhance existing search services and pitch that to existing market holders. Another strategy would be to propose highly specialized searching of unique data archives.
Do you think Alex is right in saying “…most traditional search problems have really been investigated thoroughly”?
I don’t because of the general decline in information retrieval from the 1950’s-1960’s to date.
If you doubt my observation, pick a Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature (hard copy) for 1968 and choose some subject at random. Repeat that exercise with the search engine of your choice, limiting your results to 1968.
Which one gave you more relevant references for 1968, including synonyms? Say in the first 100 entries.
I first saw this in a tweet by Stefano Bertolo.
PS: I concede that the analog book does not have digital hyperlinks to take you to resources but it does have analog links for the same purpose. And it doesn’t have product ads. 😉