Searching For The Best Engine

Even $12 billion and the billions more Google could borrow wouldn't buy all the world's search competition. The performance gap won't be hard to narrow for a hot new company freshly fueled by investors. In the end, Google has to have a better search to stay on top. Thus its army of software engineers is looking at every wrinkle in search, insists Google's research director, Peter Norvig. "I guess we're paranoid," he says. They've already injected several new technologies into its search—for example, results take into account results you've clicked on in the past, provided you've signed up to have your searches tracked. You can type in your query in plain English, get suggestions for search-term refinements, or do any of more than 40 specialized searches, including movies, government Web sites, patents, airline flights and human faces. Google just doesn't advertise any of these features, or make them plain. Although it's clear Google is capable of plenty of search innovation, there's a reason the company sometimes acts as if its hands are tied when it comes to implementing next-generation techniques. "People don't want radical change from us," says Matt Cutts, head of search quality at Google. "Our biggest task is ensuring simplicity."

It's true, most mainstream searchers do tend to value the stripped-down, no-brainer elegance of a thin box that takes a few words and delivers straightforward results. Given that a growing number of queries are being funneled to alternative engines, there are clearly plenty of power searchers willing to accept a little complexity in return for better results. It wouldn't take a smash-hit new search engine to steal Google's thunder; the damage could take the form of a slow leak of searchers to a variety of engines that each have some special appeal. Another threat to Google may be online social networking sites such as MySpace and LinkedIn. "We'll likely see dozens or hundreds of specialized search engines that collectively chip away at Google's dominance," says Brant Bukowsky, founder of Plus1 Marketing, a search consultancy.

Last quarter, Google raked in $925 million in profit, 28 percent more than the same quarter last year. The game is still Google's to lose. Even Stark, who resorted to Quintura to find her snorkeling beach, still makes Google her first stop when she needs to track down a Web site. What, after all, would Google have to fear from a tiny company with a goofy name that sometimes returns more-useful results?

© 2007