All Eyes on Google

The next step might well be called "Stuff I Should See." It involves another process cooked up by its think-tank people called Implicit Query. "Too often, searching means stopping what you're doing, open a browser and type in a query," says researcher Eric Horvitz. His alternative is software that figures out what you might want to ask for, depending on what you're doing. Only Microsoft, which provides most people's mail software, word processing and desktop, is positioned to launch such an approach. And the radically revamped file-handling system planned for the next version of Windows, codenamed Longhorn, is well suited to handle complicated searches. In short, Microsoft wants to offer a richer version of search than Google can deliver--even before you type a query into a search field.

Google's CEO and chairman Eric Schmidt--brought in by Brin and Page as the designated adult to run the company--doesn't think Google will suffer the same fate as Netscape. "This search stuff is very hard to do, and it's really very hard to do at the kind of scale that Google does it at. People will have multiple choices, and our goal is to get as many of those choices as possible to be Google."

The winners will be the ones who innovate best, because the major breakthroughs in the field are yet to come. "Search is not a solved problem," says Udi Manber, CEO of A9, a new search company formed by Amazon.com that will focus on e-commerce. "Ten years from now, what we're doing now will look pretty primitive."

Sergey Brin agrees. "I think we're pretty far along compared to 10 years ago," he says. "At the same time, where can you go? Certainly if you had all the world's information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you'd be better off. Between that and today, there's plenty of space to cover."

Indeed, over the next few years search will evolve in a number of key areas, and Google faces big competition in all of them.

DEEP CONTENT. Searching the Web can yield amazing results, but they're still limited and skewed. "What's on the Web is extremely ephemeral," says Kahle. "Very little of it was written before 1995." Amazon took a giant step to address this with its Search Inside the Book feature that lets people query a library of 120,000 tomes. Despite the pay-for-content controversy, Yahoo's CAP is an intriguing attempt to lure content providers not on the public Web to submit to its indexes. "It might take a decade or two to put all the world's information into Google and do things with it," says engineering VP Wayne Rosing. "But it's an achievable goal."