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Search Me: How the Escalating Search
Wars Will Benefit Content Markets |
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23 February 2004 |
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As Web juggernauts Yahoo! and Google officially begin their
hostilities in the battle for search supremacy, it is far
from clear whether either of these two forces are going to
emerge triumphant. Yahoo! brings deeper pockets and
corporate business savvy into the ring, but Google has gone
very far on keeping its weight down and concentrating on
the essentials of vContent
that have pushed it into its current advantageous position.
The clear winner in this fight will be the people who
desperately need more efficient content contextualization
services to make sense of the billions of Web pages and
services available today. The losers? Publishers and
aggregators that never took the fight very seriously. |
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The gloves were off a long time
ago in the tussle between Yahoo! and Google for search engine
supremacy, so when the first real blows in anger began to hit
last week there was far less surprise about the warfare
metaphors springing up in the press than there was in the
ferocity with which these two content technology forces are
engaging one another. Once Yahoo! made the long-expected
announcement of pulling Google from supporting its search
results, the Google team shot back immediately with
news of enhanced search algorithms and an additional
billion pages in their results crawling. This is just the
beginning of what promises to be a long battle of creativity
that can mean only one thing: we win. As much as there has been
noise about the importance of search, the dominance of Google
as a search product was leading to a plateau of sorts in the
progression of effective search sciences. Now with Google,
Yahoo!, Microsoft and others investing heavily in bringing
their capabilities to the next level, both suppliers and users
of content are likely to benefit greatly as content finds its
most valuable context more effectively than ever. The real
concern is how high the overall bar is set for making progress
in making the right content valuable at the right time to the
right audiences.
Based on that concern, we may be in for a long war. Yahoo!'s
first salvo is in most ways a clone of the Google interface,
complete with Overture text ads, news clips, results caching
and nearly identical layout and features - in other words, no
new ground has been broken here, it's more of an effort to keep
the loss of Google from being too noticeable. That places even
more pressure on the new Yahoo! capability to be up to snuff in
actual search results. The initial verdict: pretty good, but
still a ways to go. In some casual testing the Yahoo! engine
seems to be at least as good or better than Google at coming up
with results for categorizable queries, but Google still seems
better at intuiting content that may fall between categories.
Google's ability to hone in on what other people agree is
important content regardless of what established authorities
think is important still provides it an important edge in Web
content markets, but that edge is narrowing, at least for the
moment.
Who will likely feel the squeeze hardest as a result of the
increasingly competitive environment for content
contextualization spurred on by this rivalry? Here are a few
thoughts as to what we can look forward to in the months ahead:
- More pressure on premium content distributors.
Perhaps the weakest aspect of the new Yahoo! search presence
is what should be one of its strengths: its news
capabilities, which are bound by the syndicated sources that
are at the core of the portal's news offerings. News from a
Google perspective is much less restricted, taking in to
account any number of valuable sources that don't make their
way into typical news feeds. This ability to make news out of
anything that's valuable regardless of business deals that
define what publishers and aggregators want to be valuable is
one of the key advantages of the Google "we're just techies"
approach to content aggregation, paralleling the ingestion
and rationalization of both structured and unstructured
content that powers institutional portals today. Yahoo! may
find its more traditional deal-oriented approach to premium
content aggregation to become more of a competitive liability
in this more apples-to-apples world of competitive services.
Expect Yahoo! and others to take a closer look at expanding
their ability to define premium content from a myriad of
sources that had previously been considered off limits.
- More pressure on portal business models. Yahoo!
has a sizeable revenue advantage over Google, due in large
part to its pursuit of portal-oriented marketing, content and
advertising initiatives that help it to exploit specific
market segments efficiently. Google has made strong efforts
to resist both the image and the substance of a traditional
portal, and has missed out on significant revenues and
"stickiness" in the process. But by avoiding many of the
business deals that allow Yahoo! and others to build portal
presences Google has left open the door for contexualization
via search interfaces and other more intuitive content
retrieval capabilities that create portal-like value
resembling more the real-time workings of Google's AdSense
and AdWords or Yahoo!'s Overture more than a traditionally
negotiated portal business deal. Auctioning context in
increasingly creative ways will be the key revenue driver for
search-centric services. The additional portal revenues of a
service like Yahoo! may help fuel them ahead in this arena,
but Google's lack of baggage in supporting existing portal
models may prove to be equally important.
- More pressure for true personalization. There's
been a lot of talk about search personalization as of late,
but there's scarce little to show that really has added much
value to individuals using search services beyond the
increasingly limited Amazon model. Understanding an
individual's personal interests within a wide array of
complex and oftentimes conflicting contexts is perhaps the
hardest challenge of all in automated content
contextualization services. Expect there to be many stumbles
and false starts in the arena of personalization of search
and related services, but only because of the eagerness to
finally make it a viable concept that can propel these
services to the next level of profitability.
So if it's war they want, then bring it on. At the end of
the day most everyone creating and consuming content stands to
benefit from the increased value and productivity that
will drive people towards these important content services. The
only real losers are likely to be those that had not counted on
there being such an accelerated increase of value available to
individuals and institutions in the first place. Will the last
content company not taking their gloves off please turn off the
lights on your way out...?
-
John Blossom
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