Even if you're Google, you can't rest...

We often talk about how commoditized and crowded "search" has become, but it's important to remember that the competition, and possibly the innovation, is only going to continue to heat up.

In Silicon Valley, the Race Is On to Trump Google

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 29 — In brand-new offices with a still-empty game room
and enough space to triple their staff of nearly 30, a trio of entrepreneurs is
leading an Internet start-up with an improbable mission: to out- Google
Google.
The three started Powerset, a company whose aim is to deliver better
answers than any other search engine — including Google — by letting users type
questions in plain English. And they have made believers of Silicon Valley
investors whose fortunes turn on identifying the next big thing.
“There’s
definitely a segment of the market that thinks we are crazy,” said Charles
Moldow, a partner at Foundation Capital, a venture capital firm that is
Powerset’s principal financial backer. “In 2000, some people thought Google was
crazy.”
Powerset is hardly alone. Even as Google continues to outmaneuver its
main search rivals, Yahoo
and Microsoft,
plenty of newcomers — with names like hakia, ChaCha and Snap — are trying to
beat the company at its own game. And Wikia Inc., a company started by a founder
of Wikipedia, plans to develop a search engine that, like the popular Web-based
encyclopedia, would be built by a community of programmers and users.
These
ambitious quests reflect the renewed optimism sweeping technology centers like
Silicon Valley and fueling a nascent Internet boom. It also shows how much the
new Internet economy resembles a planetary system where everything and everyone
orbits around search in general, and around Google in particular.
Silicon
Valley is filled with start-ups whose main business proposition is to be bought
by Google, or for that matter by Yahoo or Microsoft. Countless other start-ups
rely on Google as their primary driver of traffic or on Google’s powerful
advertising system as their primary source of income. Virtually all new
companies compete with Google for scarce engineering talent. And divining
Google’s next move has become a fixation for scores of technology blogs and a
favorite parlor game among technology investors.
“There is way too much
obsession with search, as if it were the end of the world,” said Esther Dyson, a
well-known technology investor and forecaster. “Google equals money equals
search equals search advertising; it all gets combined as if this is the last
great business model.”
It may not be the last great business model, but
Google has proved that search linked to advertising is a very large and
lucrative business, and everyone — including Ms. Dyson, who invested a small sum
in Powerset — seems to want a piece of it.