Gunning for Google in Search

Google could be out-innovated if it ignores new technologies, including Powerset's semantic search and Microsoft's specialization

by Catherine Holahan

Why is Google (GOOG) still looking over its shoulder? The search giant has just locked up a deal with Yahoo! (YHOO) to run search-related text ads on its closest competitor's American and Canadian sites. That leaves Microsoft (MSFT) as Google's largest rival, with just 6% of all U.S. searches performed on its site. Google lays claim to 68% of U.S. searches and Yahoo has a 20% share, according to a June 10 report by research firm Hitwise. Yet, Google isn't relaxing. "We have to be on our toes all the time," says Udi Manber, head of Google's search quality team. "It is absolutely the case that a new technology can come along."

Manber knows an army of would-be competitors still live to fight another day. They have their eyes on the search advertising market, projected to reach $25.8 billion this year and $51 billion by 2012, according to research firm eMarketer. And they are dedicating significant money and manpower to developing innovations that could change the balance of power in search within the next 10 years. "Search can actually get better than it is today," says Brad Goldberg, Microsoft's general manager of Live Search. "We look at search as a long-term bet."

Search technology (even Google's) is still in its infancy. The form of online search familiar to most Web surfers still relies on relatively simple pattern matching: marrying query terms to words on Web pages and then ranking those results based on factors such as the frequency of a query's appearance and the number of links to a particular results page. In the future, the underlying technology behind search will almost certainly change. Search sites will implement upcoming technologies that understand human language and, in essence, read pages for answers to queries. They will adopt next-generation voice-, image-, and face-recognition software capable of better identifying multimedia content. They will incorporate systems yet to be conceived.

The result, many experts say, will be Web searches that return more answers and media, and fewer blue links. "Someone could come along and out-innovate Google," says Heather Dougherty, research director at Hitwise.

Semantic Search

One group that believes it has the key to outsearching Goliath is the so-called "semantic search" companies (BusinessWeek, 7/9/07). These companies, including Powerset and Cognition Technologies, use systems that understand the structure of the English language and the definitions of words to retrieve search results.

For example, in a semantic search engine, a query asking "which tennis players beat Andre Agassi?" would return a series of tennis champion names who "beat," "defeated," and "bested" Agassi. Powerset's first link in response to just such a query is a Pete Sampras page. Google, however, doesn't answer the query right. It links to a page on tennis-heroes.net listing the players Andre Agassi beat. "We are going to be looking back five or 10 years from now at the way we are doing search today and it is going to seem primitive," says Barney Pell, Powerset's co-founder and chief technology officer.

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