All Eyes on Google

The rest of the industry has noticed. Boy, has it noticed. To quote the numbers, Safa Rashtchy at Piper Jaffray reports that annual search revenues are just under $4 billion today (about a billion of that is Google's) and will almost triple over the next four years. But those figures don't reflect search's real impact; those empty query fields on search pages are the front doors to the Internet. If you're not indexed by Google, you pretty much don't exist. And if you're a business with a high page rank--a key metric that determines whether your site will be displayed high in the results for a given query, or buried a few hundred mouseclicks back--you can count on a thriving online trade. A horde of new companies has arisen whose services focus on performing all the tweaks and playing all the tricks that supposedly get your Web site listed higher on Google's results pages. (Google constantly fine-tunes its system to frustrate such manipulating.) If you can't afford to hire one of those firms, buy the latest offering in a famous series: "Search Engine Optimization for Dummies."

So it's no surprise that all the companies that missed out the first time around are now gearing up for the Search Wars, a clash that will be waged with algorithms, measured by terabytes and scored by click-throughs. Gunning for Google are Internet giants, clever new start-ups and an 800-pound gorilla in Redmond, Wash. They might not have gotten it at first, but now it seems terribly obvious. "Search has always been essential to people's lives," says Jeff Weiner of Yahoo. "We're all trying to seek happiness--a new car, a job, a spouse... it's how we live."

What does Brin think of the gathering forces? He... stretches. "I've seen companies obsessed with competition, say, with Microsoft, that keep looking in their rearview mirror and crash into a tree head-on because they're so distracted," he says. "If I had one magic bullet, I wouldn't spend it on a competitor. I'd spend it to make sure we're executing as well as we possibly can. I think we're doing a pretty good job."

The folks at Yahoo can't disagree. Just over a year ago those at the archetypical Internet portal realized that while the world was bowing before the altar of search, their company had little more than an overtaxed Web directory and two pieces of paper licensing other people's search technology (including you know whose). People didn't Yahoo anybody--they Googled. And for the folks at Yahoo, that could not stand.

It cost more than a billion dollars--most of it buying technology--but Yahoo is now making its bid to be a Google buster. Earlier this year it unveiled a rebuilt engine, which spits out results comparable to the other guy's. The long-term strategy is to tap the treasure house of information that lives elsewhere on the busy Yahoo portal. So your search might draw from Yahoo's traffic reports, shopping services, maps, financial data and hot Britney gossip. "Search results are not enough," says Weiner. "We're going to add another layer." (Last week, Google fired back by announcing an e-mail service, called Gmail, that offers more free memory than Yahoo's.)

Part of Yahoo's new technology portfolio is Overture, a company that pioneered an advertising practice that certain search purists regard as blasphemy: mingling "paid inclusions" with the results normally delivered in response to a search query. "We never claimed it was a better approach for doing research on 18th-century Spain," says Ted Meisel, who came to Yahoo as head of Overture. "But if you're trying to buy a power washer for your back deck, it's a pretty good way to find what you need." Now Yahoo has begun a Content Acquisition Program (CAP) that establishes a controversial relationship between its search business and companies that want to appear in the results pages. In exchange for a fee, companies can provide feeds of its pages to Yahoo's search index. Weiner says that such pages won't get unfair consideration, but critics are questioning whether the practice affects the integrity of the results. (Google's ads appear alongside its "pure" search results, and are marked as such.) Meanwhile, Google has innovated with a program it calls AdSense, which places ads on Web sites that don't belong to Google--other businesses, nonprofit or academic institutions and even blogs.