One of the big stories this week is a 10 year deal between Yahoo and Microsoft, to have their new search engine Bing power the search on Yahoo’s entire network. This means that Yahoo is going to abandon their own search technology, replacing it with the fairly new Bing. The goal of any company in the search engine business can be summarized down to two words: Beat Google.
Google has only been around for 11 years. A long time in the history of the internet, but still fairly new. We have the world’s smartest programmers and scientists. Somebody can make a better search engine than Google. However, Google and Microsoft have boatloads of money and can hire that talent to work on their own search engines.
Google can be beaten, but its more about their business models than the actual search engine. Google and Yahoo make their money from advertising and premium subscriptions to their services. They have essentially replaced AOL as the go-to online web portals. They are destination sites with lots of goodies like free email, online word processing and online games to keep people thinking about their brands all day.
Check out ask.com, previously askjeeves. They are owned by Barry Diller’s IAC. They have a lot of money and a huge marketing budget. However, they are still a distant 4th place in the world of search. Remember Lycos, one of the earlier search engines? They were around before Google, yet are afterthoughts today.
10 years from now, chances are that Yahoo, Google and Microsoft will still be in search engine business. However, will a company emerge to provide search engine services, external applications and profitable ads to sell around it? Only time will tell.
