Reactions: The Future of Alternative Search Engines

I recently wrote an article on this blog about the exit strategies for alternative search engines, that highlighted the recent and growing trend of publishers acquiring search engines; I also speculated about Charles Knight's quest to get these Alts to band together in order to grow overall traffic. I've gotten interesting reactions to the piece from some prominent bloggers.

 

I've been a fan of Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, of the HipMojo blog, for a long time. When I asked him about the Alts, his response was as follows:

No one has a crystal ball to predict with enough accuracy what will happen in the next few years with regards to search, but clearly, history suggests that there is always a period of consolidation after innovation and growth, so that should happen in search too.  And, we're seeing the big companies starting to have difficulty adding market share, it's not like adding one of these fringe search engines (including MetaMojo when I refer to alt engines as fringe) will add market share to a major one, but sometimes by buying a small player, a major company adds technology, know-how, but most importantly, brainpower.  That is the single most important variable for who will win or lose in search over the next decade: you can best deploy technology and market it, and not who can best develop technology.

One thing I was unsure of was whether traditional media would be doing the buying, I think ultimately traditional media will partner with search companies because it is not in the DNA to understand which search companies to acquire... which is a shame, because it's to old media that young search companies can most add value to...

 

David Berkowitz, of Inside The Marketers Studio stuck to his usual line where the Alts are concerned - he doesn't think most of them are good enough to get acquired or survive on their own:

Honestly, I don't think many of the alternative engines are good enough to be acquired, though a few will find that as an exit strategy, and a few others will survive as niche alternatives.

 

Microsoft's Don Dodge, who has a terrific blog The Next Big Thing, got so interested that he wrote a separate blog post to address this question. Here's a snippet from his post:

My thoughts? Some of these will be acquired by the big search engines or big content publishing networks. Most of them will fade away. I don't see any of them breaking out and creating a significant stand alone business with the possible exceptions of Powerset, Hakia, and Mahalo.

Read Don's post to find out where he thinks the big, untapped opportunities lie.

 

Bob Warfield, of the SmoothSpan blog, responded with an interesting blog post, proposing that:

Alt Search providers can get together and create an Open Sourced Collaborative Search-Oriented Social Network ...

In essence, he argues that the Alts could get together to share the costs and burdens of web crawling and the underlying infrastructure. This would help them to reduce the gap with the big players, which have a huge advantage in terms of resources. You can find his post here.

 

Conclusion

The overall consensus is that, unless something changes, most of the alternative search engines will not survive; some will get acquired and a few players may do well on their own, especially if they focus on a specific niche. A convergence in markets (e.g. local and mobile), or joint efforts on building the infrastructure, would give them a better chance.

Personally, I see the lack of web traffic as being the single biggest weakness of the alternative search engines; regardless of their cool technologies, innovative architectures or stunning visualizations, they cannot survive without getting the word out and capturing market share in search. There are simply too many web site destinations for the average user to remember. If the Alts could somehow cooperate to provide a single entry point that then branches off to different specializations, it would be a huge step forward!

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Comments

[Steffen]

"There are simply too many web site destinations for the average user to remember. If the Alts could somehow cooperate to provide a single entry point that then branches off to different specializations, it would be a huge step forward!"

Yep, hopefully we can pull this off at Sputtr.com :)

[daniel]

MyLocator.com and the family of 1300 Strategic vertical location engines will dominate vertical search. 1300 locator domains all working for the mylocator.com empire. MyLocator owns the Strategic Vertical Locator Brand on the Internet. Alts are experiencing
Search engine overload and branding fatique (terrible names). Cyber Blah grows rampant, too many channels not enough premium location. Alts become Lost in a Digital Dilemma. MyLocator becomes the Greatest Strategic Vertical multichannel Alt Engine on the Planet.

[Avi]

I have been following this topic lately and I have to agree that it is hard to know the answer at this time. However, I tend to believe that the key for alt engines is not to be the google killer but to bring an added value search capability that is a must-have for other search applications - whether it is then bought or it remains independent, yet integrated into other search engines.

[David Berkowitz]

Great roundup here, and also in the Future of Search collaboration with Kaila Colbin and co. Keep it coming! David

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