Google Killer?
Does Powerset make Sergey Bryn and Larry Page stay up at night? You’d think Powerset is the greatest thing since, well, Google, amid the hype about its still-in-development natural language search technology. The latest news about Powerset is a deal it has struck with Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center to license a portfolio of patents and technology, which have been under development for the past 30 years.
Who knows if Powerset will be successful in creating technology that produces better results than Google, and then whether it can convince the world it’s developed a better mouse trap but it has raised $12.5-million in venture capital. For people looking to use a search engine other than Google until Powerset launches, check out Read Write/Web’s list of the top 100 alternative search engines.
February 9th, 2007 at 11:59 am
I’ve noticed that you seem to really like taking on Google and proposing that some rogue entity out there in the market is going to knock them out and deflate their value. Several posts have eluded to the idea of a “Google killer” and I think it is rubbish.
First of all, Google is established and has name brand behind them. Second of all they have a good trait behind them that other companies are going to have trouble copying… they develop services and then make them free.
Third, I have yet to see a natural language search produce anything better than Google keyword search which is rumored to have something like 700+ variables in defining relevancy and ranking of results.
I don’t believe there is any real Google “killer” out there, but there might be a strong competitor. Either way, Google is still fresh for a fight with a huge war chest of cash and again, name branding that will let it bull-doze its way through competition.
Sergey and Larry…. I am sure they sleep nice every night on soft silk sheets and a pillow filled with cash. Even if Google was some how to go down, they would have dumped a lot of stock already to make sure their lives are comfortable for years to come.
February 9th, 2007 at 2:31 pm
As promising as their natural language platform sounds, the greatest threat to Google’s growing hegemony in the search/paid search arenas…given that about 1/2 of all searches are known to be for products and services…may actually spring not from better search, but from patent pending (#11/250,908) paid match, which will target people’s actual demographic and psychographic traits and characteristics (keytraits) instead of just the words we all type into little search boxes.
Though paid match is not yet an operating system, our own US Dept of Labor does run a very popular service (over 500,000 users/month) which provides an enlightening and instructive peak at the potential that such a paid match search/ad platform possesses.
Called GovBenefits (available at govbenefits.gov), it utilizes a personal profile and a match engine to determine what government benefit programs people qualify for.
Were such a system populated with the 100’s of thousands to millions of products and services companies provide nation/worldwide instead of just the 400-odd government programs it includes now, one can only imagine what its public popularity would be…
…and with the world’s advertisers having the ability to pinpoint target and control; via bidding directly on those keytraits most relevant and applicable to their products and services, exactly who sees their ads (goodbye click fraud); one can also only imagine the deleterious effects that such an elegant and superior system/platform would have on a 95% PPC income dependent company like Google…
February 9th, 2007 at 2:41 pm
Even if Google lost it’s rank as a search engine, the company would still have AdSense, Google Checkout, and a pile of other profitable services. Something tells me this won’t happen, but you never know.
March 7th, 2007 at 7:36 am
Try to do a search on google and you get mountains of “less than optimum” sites that you have to wade through. The real google killer will be one that lets you weed out the “less than optimum” even if those guys pay a pretty penny to be on page one. Page one will have the right answer instead of the one who paid to be there. When you select “information” you will get information. When you select commercial, you will get the places where you can buy. Google will succumb to their own success, they will have so many pages of “less than optimum” results that the average person won’t have the time to do their own sorting - something that a search engine should do for you.