Google's CEO and chairman Eric Schmidt—brought in by Brin
and Page as the designated adult to run the company is a veteran of Sun and
Novell, so he knows something about being Netscaped. He thinks it won't happen
to Google. "Why should we assume that that's any more likely than the 50 other
scenarios that we could come up with that don't involve this diabolical
Netscape kind of thing? This search stuff is very hard to do, and it's really
very hard to do at the kind of scale that Google does it at. People will have
multiple choices, and our goal is to get as many of those choices as possible to
be Google."
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The winners will be the ones
who innovate best, because the major breakthroughs in the field are yet to come.
"Search is not a solved problem," says Udi Manber, CEO of A9, a new search
company formed by Amazon.com that will focus on e-commerce. Ten years from now,
what we're doing now will look pretty primitive."
Sergey Brin agrees. "I think we're pretty far along
compared to 10 years ago," he says. "At the same time, where can you go?
Certainly if you had all the world's information directly attached to your
brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you'd be better
off. Between that and today, there's plenty of space to cover."
Indeed, over the next few years search will evolve in a
number of key areas, and Google faces big competition in all of them.
DEEP CONTENT. Searching the Web
can yield amazing results, but they're still limited and skewed. "What's on the
Web is extremely ephemeral," says Brewster Kahle. "Very little of it was written
before 1995." Amazon took a giant step to address this with its Search Inside
the Book feature that lets people query a library of 120,000 tomes. Despite the
pay-for-content controversy, Yahoo's CAP is an intriguing attempt to lure
content providers not on the public Web to submit to its indexes. "It might take
a decade or two to put all the world's information into Google and do things
with it," says engineering VP Wayne Rosing. "But it's an achievable goal."
MULTIMEDIA. Google has an Image
Search function with almost a billion pictures. Microsoft researchers in China
are going full blast to create software that searches through pictures—possibly
identifying faces and locations. Meanwhile, a Washington, D.C., start-up called
Streamsage has created breakthrough technology that searches audio and video
broadcasts by analyzing speech. And AOL, whose search strategy is to build
features on top of Google technology, recently bought an audio-video search
operation called SingingFish.
PERSONALIZATION. A search engine
that knows you're a sports-car buff is more likely to give you auto sites when
you query the word Jaguar. Google here is at a disadvantage compared with places
like Yahoo and Amazon, which know a lot about their customers.
LOCALIZATION. Last week Google
introduced its local search, which produces a map when you type in a category
(say "restaurants") and a ZIP code. But again, Yahoo and MSN have loads of
information about where its users live. The breakthrough here might come in a
marriage of search engines and cell phones.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. "The
ultimate goal is to have a computer that has the kind of semantic knowledge that
a reference librarian has," says Google's director of technology Craig
Silverstein. But truly smart search engines are probably decades away.
Google's
plan to keep up in these areas is to unleash its brain power in two ways. First,
its engineers try to whittle down a rolling list of the Top 100 tasks,
determined by Brin, Page and other top execs. Then, as dictated by Google's
self-professed "bottom-up" management style, those wizards are permitted to
spend 20 percent of their time working on projects of their choosing. Often
these ideas wind up becoming part of the Google collection of features, as was
the case for the popular Google News. Another breakout project was Orkut, a
social-networking service designed by a young engineer named Orkut Buyukkokten.
"My dream is to connect all Internet users so they can all relate to each
other," he says.
Typical Google big-think. But skeptics are saying that
Google's increasingly varied roster of services shows that the company is losing
focus. And that its bottom-up style causes chronic disorganization. CEO Schmidt
isn't worried. "I believe the disorganization is a feature," he says. "The
culture of companies is set early, and if you changed it, you'd lose all of the
great things. This model has worked very well for us."
The confidence is reminiscent of the mood at another
Mountain View, Calif., company in 1996: Netscape. Schmidt rejects the
comparison. "The best check on hubris," he says, "is your competitors." And now,
the Google guys have plenty of 'em.
