All Eyes on Google

Brewster Kahle, founder of the nonprofit Internet Archive, is hoping that at least some of the search world remains beyond the forces of Mammon. After all, when 71 percent of American middle- and high-school students use the Internet as their No. 1 research venue, isn't it a bit disturbing that homework is becoming a sponsored activity? Kahle is encouraging an alternative. He provides the infrastructure for would-be search wizards to create their own "open source" (noncommercial) engines. "I'd like to see a Google a month," he says.

Competitors are popping out of the woodwork and even coming back from the dead. One rival is a rejuvenated Ask Jeeves, a onetime dot-com bubble casualty. In 2001 it acquired the technology and the engineering team behind the highly regarded search technology of Teoma.

Of course, Google's biggest problem may well be (cue soundtrack from "Jaws") Microsoft. Bill Gates is constitutionally unable to countenance the idea that a cheeky Silicon Valley start-up can claim even the mildest role as an Internet gateway. Last autumn Gates told NEWSWEEK that his company's complacency in search was a grave error that would soon be corrected. "We didn't make it as much of a priority as we should have," he said. "We recognized that, and we're on the job." At the World Economic Forum earlier this year, he was even more frank: "[Google] kicked our butts," he said. The last time Microsoft felt similarly embarrassed--when it failed to notice that the Internet was kind of going to be a big thing--Gates started a companywide jihad that didn't stop until his competitor, Netscape, was eviscerated.

This time, Googlers claim that it's the Softies who are out of their league. Anna Patterson, a Stanford search wizard recruited by both companies (she chose the Googleplex), had the chance to evaluate Microsoft's talent. Not impressed. "It's a bunch of people at the first grade," she says. "Eight junior programmers who don't know anything about search."

Microsoft's answer: just wait. "I'm more than glad to have people underestimate what we can do," says the VP in charge of Microsoft's search effort, Yusuf Mehdi. "You can't remotely discount the level of technical talent we have devoted to this."

Though Microsoft hasn't announced the details of its search strategy, an outline is taking shape. The first step involves transforming the lackluster search engine it currently uses in MSN. "We're taking our time to architect a next-generation system that answers people's questions, an end-to-end system that will leapfrog what's out there today," says Mehdi. Subsequent stages involve tapping into the company's unique advantages--the software used by hundreds of millions of people to run their computers and create their documents. To Microsoft, search will involve everything on your own machine and other databases to which you have access. Gates has recently been demoing a program called Stuff I've Seen, which uses "memory landmarks" to search through e-mails, photographs and documents.