Where’s the Firefox for Search?

By Mark Evans | Published: June 18, 2008

Aside from the kvetching and grumbling yesterday about Mozilla’s servers struggling under the strain, one thing that struck me about yesterday’s Firefox download frenzy (five million and counting) was how Firefox has emerged from an interesting open-source project to 20% of the browser market.

When Firefox started, Internet Explorer had emasculated Netscape – leaving it with 90%+ of the market and little competition. Then, Firefox leapt onto the scene. Slowly but surely, it started to gain more traction and market share. Ass important, it has sparked the creation of new browsers such as Flock.

Firefox has been successful for several reasons: the open-source community continues to push new features; Firefox works as well if not better than IE; and users have embraced Firefox as the valiant underdog. This has given Firefox street cred and a great brand. Google has helped by giving Firefox a business model.

So, here’s the question: why has Firefox been able to do so well in the browser market against the dominant player, while a new and exciting player has yet to emerge in the search engine market to take on Google?

There’s no lack of search start-ups (e.g. Powerset, Mahalo, Jimmy Wales’ Wikia, Quintura) but none of them have truly captured the imagination of users. There’s nothing out there that would make a loyal Google user consider another option.

How come?

Maybe someone hasn’t built another mouse-trap yet. Or perhaps search startups are unwilling to go head-to-head with Google, and have decided to focused on verticals where it can avoid Google. Or maybe Google is invincible.

Any way you slice it, competition is good thing so here’s hoping the Firefox of search happens.

For more, check out Wired’s Epicenter blog, which looked at how long Google will remain dominant. For anyone interested in Firefox 3, you can download it here. As well, Alex Barrera has some interesting thoughts on the future of search that involves the reading of brain neurons.

For some perspective, here’s a chart looking at the traffic for Mahalo, Quintura and Wikia. In May, Google had 135.2 million U.S. visitors.