Yesterday at 6pm EST, I was speaking with a successful entrepreneur who mentioned that the sale of his company ranked in the Top Internet deals of all time. I didn’t say anything, but had the gentlemen known that I was obsessed with deals and dealmaking, I had written a couple of posts on the matter, like the Top 10 Web M&A deals of all time, or a comprehensive post on 2007’s deals in new media and tech. Anyway, when we hung up, I asked, what are the top m&a deals of all time. So as I began to wander the Web I began to compile a list - far from complete mind you - of big mergers and acquisitions in technology, media, health, finance, energy, etc. Here it is.
But that is not the point of this post. Let’s back up some more in time.
Importance of Natural Language Search
Yesterday morning, Nitin Karandikar, who pens the Software Abstractions blog emailed me a post he published on Powerset. In it, he chronicled the merits of natural language search. I didn’t read it initially at the time he sent it to me, but went back to it today and agree in general that natural language search has its place. Whether or not it will be a killer app of sorts remains to be seen, largely because natural language search is akin to the better mouse trap syndrome. It’s a nice to have, not a need to have… and the few times you need it, a normal search engine like Google would suffice.
Opportunities for Niche Search Engines
Bear in mind, before I launched WatchMojo.com (video content, syndication & monetization) I invested a bit of money and time in a vertical, domain-specific search engine called MetaMojo.com. I even added a meta video search engine component on top of it. The point is I have put my money where my mouth is: there is a place for niche in search… but I think search is pretty much a done deal unless a massive tectonic shift in the landscape.
How Google Won in Search
Mind you, such changes have occurred, but before search engine advertising was a 40% piece of the global $30B online advertising pie. The main landscape-altering deal was Yahoo! deciding to power its search results with Google. That was a micro event. At the micro event, it was both the portalization trend that all initial search companies embraced in the late 1990s (AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, etc.) combined with the Nasdaq crash and dot com bubble bursting which allowed Google to coast to the finish line. In my humble opinion, the only way for there to be any challenge to Google entails not a better mouse trap but a cataclysmic shift to Google’s obstacles. The only thing I see is a merger of MSN.com/Live.com and Yahoo! and in a separate entity outside of Redmond-based Microsoft (owned 33-45% by Microsoft and 55-67% by Yahoo!’s existing shareholders). But this post is not about that.
This post is more about asking, does natural search engine alone merit a shift in consumer behavior? I do not think so. I think Nitin is right that natural language search is a welcome addition to the landscape, but it is neither tectonic nor cataclysmic. It is evolutionary at best, and not revolutionary.
Speed Kills
Frankly, the most recent revolutionary change in search was when Google [quietly] began to update its index perpetually, or least every 24 hours. Up to 2005 for sure, 2006 probably, and I suspect some time in 2007… Google did not update that quickly. But faced with Technorati’s blog search which did seem to index recently-posted content better, Google stepped it up and now seems to update very quickly. I think this is more important than natural language. Bear in mind, we live in a very different world. Yes a lot of searches are done on timeless topics (who was Alexander the Great?) but a lot more will be done in timely topics (who killed Benazir Bhutto?).
Follow the Audience
As more and more audiences move online, when news breaks, less and less people will turn on their TV to get news. In this context, the search engines who will most quickly connect audiences with content will have a chance to win.
Testing the Top 4 Search Engines
So, since we’re talking about search… why on earth did I start this manuscript with my recent post on largest M&A deals of all time?
I’m glad you asked. Last night I published that post at around 11pm. I continued looking for deals to add this morning… and today continued in between calls, meetings, and the 5 or so posts I published on HipMojo.com.
CONTESTANT #1: GOOGLE.COM
When I did the search this afternoon, I was impressed to see that Google had already indexed my post - less than 24 hours after my post (2nd result):
That being said, given what the searched keywords were, I am surprised my article did not come out #1. The reason for this is two-fold, result #1 comes from a high-quality source, probably has a lot of PageRank mojo, and is close enough in content… but not precise, since 2006’s top deals is really not all-time top deals. So Google loses some points.
=> Google Scores: 4.5/5
CONTESTANT #2 - YAHOO!
So I continued my search. Did Yahoo! index the content, too? As you can see, sort of, it picked up the tags of categories that the post was listed under, but not the actual post’s URL.
All in all, they still score high because at the time a user searches for it and clicks on it, they would fall on that tag, and thus post, unless the publisher would have published more posts under that tag, at which point the user would not get the article or story in question. It is very important for Yahoo! to score high in terms of speed for one simple reason: it’s a portal, people are already on Yahoo! pages so if they search for something timely and do not get what they are looking for, they will go elsewhere, likely to a place like Google.
=> Yahoo! Scores: 4/5
CONTESTANT #3 - MSN.COM
What about #3 MSN.com?
MSN.com actually missed my post (but its results were fine). A friendly suggestion to MSN Search, if you are trying to fight for market share, updating the index is something you might want to do). Similarly to Yahoo! though, since MSN is a portal, that means they have an existing audience firing off searches. If a user does not find the most timely of information, they too will bolt, probably once again to Google.
=> MSN Scores: 3/5
CONTESTANT #4 - Ask.com
Last but not least, IAC’s Ask.com:
Ask.com did not pick up the post at all, but it did index a previous post I had on M&A, so I can’t say anything too negative about them (I’m kidding).
At the risk of being a smart ass, I will say this: IAC spent $100M on an advertising campaign that was ineffective, touting some algorithm.
Maybe, I’d invest $75M of that in servers and index the Web more frequently… and then take the $25M to buy up keywords on larger search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN.com to tout the fact that Ask.com has the latest results… of course, for that to happen, they actually need the algorithm to do that.
Now that would be a helluva [mouse] trap to steer away users.
=> Ask.com Scores: 2/5
So, what does this all say?
This is a very small test to show why Google is winning in search. My post went up 24 hours ago and it was technically the only search engine to pick it up.
Cliches aside, online, 24 hours is a long time… if search engines want to become the default choice for users, as more and more users turn to the Web for news and information, then I would think timeliness and speed of indexing new content is as important - if not more - that natural language search.
Lastly, I know what you’re thinking: what about Searching off the News Tab, which indexes more recent material. Well, that is pretty niche. We think that ultimately, the future of the Web is closer to Universal Search than niche search…
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