Google falling victim to success
Competitors ready to pounce as search engine proves vulnerable
By Francine Brevetti - BUSINESS WRITER
From Oakland Tribune.
oaklandtribune.com
I T'S EASY to spell. It's fun to say. The site is easy to view and the search is quick. How long will Google stay top dog?
For more than three years, Google of Mountain View has been the dominant search engine. Some users know only "Google" as an option. The brand's penetration has been so successful that its name has become a verb. (Unlike Xerox or Kleenex, which have urged the public not to use their brand names as generic terms, there is no evidence that Google is discouraging the use of its name to denote the search process.)
In a quick, unscientific survey, several entrepreneurs in the Bay Area responded "Google" when asked which search engines they used.
"I just got used to it," was the usual explanation.
Analysts think newer products and some vulnerability in Google's organization might make room for other entrants.
STEVE BERKOWITZ is president of Ask Jeeves Web properties. Hed like to see Teomas technology gain dominance among search engines. NICK LAMMERS Staff
The contribution of Google, which did not respond to requests for an interview, has been considerable. Looking at the Web as a collection of sites linked to other sites, the engine finds the popular sites quickly. It provides search results without the clutter of a portal such as AOL or Yahoo.
"Consumers care about brand infinitely more than technology," said Matthew Berk, senior analyst for Jupiter Research. "They associate brand with a certain kind of search. They think Google for research and Yahoo for (finding) people and community."
"Google is quick and uncluttered, it gets you to popular sites fast. But Teoma is richer and more complicated. If someone wants more refined results, they go to Teoma," he said, referring to Ask Jeeves' www.teoma.com search engine.
Berk said that he is worried that Google would ruin its clean look and feel by adding many other features, most recently a news wire and Froogle, an engine that detects discounted merchandise among retailers online. If Google steers too close to the portal model, it could sap what people like most about it.
Chris Sherman, associate editor of Search Engine Watch, said, "There's a perception that Google is the best magic box for anything in the universe. Google is good for simple words and short terms. Teoma is better for more specialized types of information and looks at the whole community" of links around a certain topic.
Greg Notess, publisher of Search Engine Showdown, said there was a concern that Google's dominance would vitiate its quality one day.
"That's why people are pleased to hear Teoma has new features," he said.
Google's continuing dominance is an anomaly, said Jupiter's Berk, in that it has held its throne for more than three years.
"Other players dropped the ball, not focusing on search but on becoming a portal, full of horoscopes and weather," he said, making examples of HotBot, Yahoo and AltaVista.
"That lack of focus allowed Google to swoop in with a good product. But in the last year or so many major companies have made an effort to reach up to Google and to a large extent they have. Most major search engines are as good and in some cases better," said Berk, citing Alltheweb.com, Teoma and Inktomi as credible contenders.
A year and a half ago, Emeryville's Ask Jeeves acquired Teoma to power its own search engine Ask.com. In the last year, Teoma has reported several advances and new features with a home page remarkably similar to Google's -- a plain white field with spare graphics. Its index (list of entries) has quintupled in the meantime, including 500 million URLs -- but it is still substantially behind Google and AOL.
Steve Berkowitz, president of Web properties at Ask Jeeves, explained that Teoma's technology was adopted to power Ask.com, but is also available under the domain name www.teoma.com . He said Teoma was great for the searcher who doesn't articulate a question very well. <RR note - might be good for some "researchers" who constantly post here. Might make their "posts" a bit more relevant.>
When it's hard to understand the intent, Teoma finds communities that are similar or linked to your question under its "Refine" feature.
"Google has done a tremendous job of building brand," Berkowitz said. "But with 92 million people searching every day, we know people are looking for different flavors of search. We find communities related to a query faster."
Yahoo and HotBot have been criticized for not keeping up with the competition, but in fact they are lately making changes too.
These days, a visit to HotBot brings up results from Google, Teoma, AlltheWeb and Inktomi, a kind of end run around all the contenders. Kathy O'Reilly of HotBot in Waltham, Mass., acknowledged that when Lycos acquired HotBot (designed for serious, tech-savvy searchers, she said) in 1999, it didn't invest much in the property. But in December it transformed HotBot (powered by Inktomi's technology) into a "search interface" with the other engines.
Meanwhile, Sunnyvale-based Yahoo has made significant changes and will be launching a marketing campaign soon to bring them to the public's attention. When Yahoo altered its home page's appearance in October 2002, the company detected that users returned more frequently.
The search engine-portal is integrating its search features into "its core assets," according to Jennifer Dulkski, senior director of marketing, search and marketplace.
Users loyal of Yahoo Mail will find searches integrated into the e-mail function. Those seeking a stock quote will find all the search engine's bounty delivered when they just input the stock symbol.
The company also is developing a tool bar that the user can call on to make searches when they are outside the Yahoo site.
Time was, a person tended to migrate from one search engine to another as he became more Web savvy. HotBot was the granddaddy in the mid-'90s to be replaced in popularity by Palo Alto's AltaVista, while people who cluster around portals such as AOL or the free Yahoo have relied on those sites' engines.
Google stymied the industry for a while, retaining users beyond the industry's experience. Now it appears, Google's stickiness may be starting to give.
Francine Brevetti can be reached at (510) 208-6416 and fbrevetti@angnewspapers.com . |
