Is this the End of Google ?

[bballad]

MS will not take down google, google will take down google. Curently they are a private company and push most of their profit into R&D, as soon as their ipo hits the investors will not like that at all. The direction of the company will change and they will stop being number 1

[Ennis]

Nooooo! Google must never die!

[esi1]

A nice little look into Google :- http://www.fortune.com/fortune/techn...548765,00.html

Google has a great formula in that its page is simple and fast to load, it has a large index and it is simply a search engine unlike the Yahoos,altavista's and the other portals but the think that bugs me is it move towards trying to make money in the form of froogle etc and so eventually trying to become a multi-facetted business. This expansion into other areas will kill google and will happen with any IPO when investors are looking at their yearly dividends from the share holdings in google.

Lets take this conversation another way, are their any search services out there that are going in the right direction in order to take search engines to the next level or even does anyone have any ideas as to the next big think thats going to move search engines over the next 3-4 years.

[foxyloxley]

PC Magazine - special wireless edition 2003 - page 22. The Anti-Search Engine.
IBM's Web-Fountain ? Potential Google Killer ?? using state of th eart tools, pattern recognition, natural language processing, Bayesian Probability theory. It crawls the NET and using these approaches it brings back 'intelligent answers' to questions ?

Not ready yet, but it is in the pieline.
Maybe M$ have jumped onto the wrong boat ???

[esi1]

Foxy, Tell me more as i havent heard about this IBM thing ? if theres a link please provide it as im very interested in learning more.

thanks

[esi1]

actually , Ive just found the link to the anti-search engine page.

[foxyloxley]

Sorry esi 1
my system is having a fit at the moment and keeps throwing me out of IE.
I don't have a link as such anyway, I'm afraid. and now I've just seen your 2nd reply.
As I said, it isn't ready now, BUT.

[Agent_Steal]

Here you go esi1 here's a link to where you can learn more about IBM's Web Fountain. Seems quite an interesting to me.

WebFountain is a new text analytics technology from IBM's Research division that analyzes millions of pages of data weekly. Using this technology, organizations can access critical business information and uncover valuable insights that are otherwise difficult and costly to acquire by manual methods.

http://www-1.ibm.com/mediumbusiness/...erging/wf.html

Here's another link:
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/WebFountain/

To learn more about it you can simply just send them an e-mail:

For More Information email:
WebFountain@Almaden.IBM.COM

Hope this helps ..

This is an interesting article to read as well ...

Untangling The Web

http://www.library.ucsb.edu/untangle/lager.html

[Striek]

I would think that people only use Google for the most part because the MSN search sucks. If Microsoft were to build or acquire one that could actually compete with Google, most people would just use that. Think about it. Nearly every computer in the world already ships with the MSN page as the home page. When people realize how much better Google is, they use that instead. Imagine if Windows still shipped with IE3. The browser market would still be a 50/50 split.

When Windows shipped with IE3, Netscape lost something like 80% of its market share and just died out. As long as people had a choice, it was split down the middle. But why download Netscape when you've already got IE?

Then came instant messaging. ICQ was all the rage. They had an 80% market share until Windows began to ship with MSN. Then nobody bothered anymore to look for another client because MSN worked fine.

Remember when everybody used Winamp? That didn't fade as much as my previous examples, but they still lost a huge market share when Microsoft decided to ship a decent media player with Windows.

Wordperfect used to have a 40% market share I think also. That was until Windows began shipping with Word, anyway.

With a market penetration and resources like Microsoft's, you can pretty much crush any competition you want to. And anyone they can't crush they can always buy. Hotmail used to be an independent company which Microsoft couldn't compete with. So they bought them instead to get a foothold in the email industry.

Their slogan should be "If you can't beat 'em, buy 'em."

[Schrodinger]

Originally posted here by Striek
Wordperfect used to have a 40% market share I think also. That was until Windows began shipping with Word, anyway.

While I agree with your reasoning, I have to pick up on this. Windows does not ship with Word. Office does. It was the Office suite that killed WP - the idea of selling one integrated ( almost ) package to cover all of your needs. WP could not immediately compete, and was always playing catchup from then onwards.

As always, the triumph of marketing over technology.