Up and coming: A9's Udi
Manber (left) and Yahoo's Jeff Weiner both say search engine technology
will improve dramatically in the years to come
Newsweek
It cost more than a billion dollars—most of it buying
technology—but Yahoo is now making its bid to be a Google buster. Last month it
unveiled a rebuilt engine, which spits out results comparable to the other
guy's. The long-term strategy is to tap the treasure house of information that
lives elsewhere on the busy Yahoo portal. So your search might draw from Yahoo's
traffic reports, shopping services, maps, financial data and hot Britney gossip.
"Search results are not enough," says Weiner. "We're going to add another
layer."
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Part of Yahoo's new technology
portfolio is Overture, a company that pioneered an advertising practice that
certain search purists regard as blasphemy: mingling "paid inclusions" with the
results normally delivered in response to a search query. "We never claimed it
was a better approach for doing research on 18th-century Spain," says Ted
Meisel, who came to Yahoo as head of Overture. "But if you're trying to buy a
power washer for your back deck, it's a pretty good way to find what you need."
Now Yahoo has begun a Content Acquisition Program (CAP) that establishes a
controversial relationship between its search business and companies that want
to appear in the results pages. In exchange for a fee, companies can provide
feeds of its pages to Yahoo's search index. Weiner says that such pages won't
get unfair consideration, but critics are questioning whether the practice
affects the integrity of the results. (Google's ads appear alongside its "pure"
search results, and are marked as such.)
Meanwhile, Google has innovated with a program it calls
AdSense, which places ads on Web sites that don't belong to Google—other
businesses, nonprofit or academic institutions and even blogs. The effects are
only gradually becoming apparent. Software designer Tim Bray was impressed when
he signed up for AdSense ads on his blog—he says it changed an expensive hobby
to a profitable sideline—but worries that the pressure to expose the ads to new
users might tempt people to alter their content to boost ad revenue.
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Kahle, founder of the nonprofit Internet Archive, is hoping that at least some
of the search world remains beyond the forces of Mammon. After all, when 71
percent of middle- and high-school students use the Internet as their No. 1
research venue, isn't it a bit disturbing that homework is becoming a sponsored
activity? Kahle is encouraging an alternative. He provides the infrastructure
for would-be search wizards to create their own "open source" (noncommercial)
engines. "I'd like to see a Google a month," he says.
Competitors are popping out of the woodwork and even
coming back from the dead. One rival is a rejuvenated Ask Jeeves, a onetime
dot-com bubble casualty. In 2001, it acquired the technology and the engineering
team behind the highly regarded search technology of Teoma.
Of course, Google's biggest problem may well be (cue
soundtrack from "Jaws") Microsoft. Bill Gates is constitutionally unable to
countenance the idea that a cheeky Silicon Valley start-up can claim even the
mildest role as an Internet gateway. Last autumn Gates told NEWSWEEK that his
company's complacency in search was a grave error that would soon be corrected.
"We didn't make it as much of a priority as we should have," he said. "We
recognized that, and we're on the job." At the World Economic Forum earlier this
year, he was even more frank: "[Google] kicked our butts," he said.
The last time Microsoft felt similarly embarrassed—when
it failed to notice that the Internet was kind of going to be a big thing—Gates
started a companywide jihad that didn't stop until his competitor was
eviscerated. Now there's even a word for what happens when Microsoft leverages
its monopoly power to flip a rival into the toaster: Netscaped. You wouldn't
blame its rivals for quaking in their query fields.
Instead, Googlers claim that this time it's the Softies
who are out of their league. Anna Patterson, a Stanford search wizard recruited
by both companies (she chose the Googleplex), had the chance to evaluate
Microsoft's talent. Not impressed. "It's a bunch of people at the first grade,"
she says. "Eight junior programmers who don't know anything about search."
Microsoft's answer: just wait. "I'm more than glad to
have people underestimate what we can do," says the VP in charge of Microsoft's
search effort, Yusuf Mehdi. "You can't remotely discount the level of technical
talent we have devoted to this."
NEWSWEEK RADIO |
3/21/04
Next
Frontiers: Internet Searching, Voting, and Politics
Steven Levy, NEWSWEEK
Technology Columnist, and David Nelson,
Director, National Coordination Office for Information
Technology R & D, National Science and Technology Council,
Executive Office of the President
Though
Microsoft hasn't announced the details of its search strategy, an outline is
taking shape. The first step involves transforming the lackluster search engine
it currently uses in MSN. "We're taking our time to architect a next-generation
system that answers people's questions, an end-to-end system that will leapfrog
what's out there today," says Mehdi. Subsequent stages involve tapping into the
company's unique advantages—the software used by hundreds of millions of people
to run their computers and create their documents. To Microsoft, search will
involve everything on your own machine and other databases to which you have
access. Gates has recently been demoing a program out of his research division
called Stuff I've Seen, which uses "memory landmarks" to search through e-mails,
photographs and documents.
The next step might well be called "Stuff I
Should See." It involves another process cooked up by its think-tank
people called Implicit Query. "Too often, searching means stopping what you're
doing, open a browser and type in a query," says researcher Eric Horvitz. His
alternative is software that figures out what you might want to ask for,
depending on what you're doing. Only Microsoft, which provides most people's
mail software, word processing and desktop, is positioned to launch such an
approach. And the radically revamped file-handling system planned for the next
version of Windows, codenamed Longhorn, happens to be perfectly suited to handle
complicated searches. In short, if Microsoft pulls off its goals (easier said
than done), it can offer people a richer version of search than Google can
deliver—even before they bother to type their queries into a search field.
