A new post by Fortune.com, entitled Google: The Search Party Is Over” is an interesting read especially for domainers who do any significant domain parking.
The article which in large part discusses the business operations of Google says about search:
That there is a real shift going on within the internet where search will soon be less used.
“”The shift going on within the Internet, one that is arguably the biggest change to the web and the way we use it since Google came on the scene. Your network simply provides you with answers, stories to read, bargains to buy, and you often don’t even need to ask a question.”
The article quotes a Mike McCue who “recently launched a tablet software company Flipboard, which takes all your Facebook updates, your Twitter feeds, all the news sites you like and subscribe to, and in a very elegant way publishes a constantly updated magazine of text, photos, and video. “There is no need to do a search,” McCue says. “We almost view it as a bug if we have the user search for something.”
“In this new phase of the web, one of the largest threats to Google and its core search business is the expanding Facebook footprint around the world. Not only because social networks offer a substitute for search for consumers, but also because they offer a substitute for advertisers as well. In display advertising, for example, Facebook has a 16% share of the roughly $9 billion market, according to comScore (Google sites have 2.4% of the market), and advertisers say they’re looking for more ways to plug into Facebook.”
“Facebook has got Google in its sights,” says Debra Aho Williamson, a senior analyst with eMarketer. “Advertisers get the best of both worlds — a mass audience but also the ability to target more than anyone else. Who are the advertisers? In a lot of cases, they’re Google’s advertisers.”
Lots of companies lot to see Google flatter but Google keeps getting stronger every day. Google knows how to reinvent itself.
They should be talking about Yahoo /Microsoft–they are dinosaurs.
Opps– fatt fingers
lot=love
it’s an illusion… just see the Google/Yahoo Japan’s deal… within 2-3 years Google will buy Yahoo and Bing reaching 90% of the SE market
Yahoo Japan is majority owned by a japanese company. (Softbank)
Yahoo Inc has a smaller stake in it.
I just finished reading the article thanks to the link you provided. Where else can Google go now that they own the internet. I remember seeing this joke somewhere, where Google announced it was going to re-acquisition itself because there was nothing left for them to buy. Funny thing, the article never once mentioned the launch of Google TV and the impact (if any?) it will have on television, advertising, consumer and search habits, etc,.
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Yahoo and Bing are ALREADY DEAD on mobile: “Google’s Mobile Search Market Share: An Estimated, Whopping 98.29%”
techcrunch.com/2010/07/29/google-mobile-search-market-share/
also, Google plans to increase its revenue by over $10 billions ONLY thanks to Android: “Eric Schmidt on Google’s Next Tricks”
blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/07/28/eric-schmidt-on-google%25E2%2580%2599s-next-tricks/?mod=e2tw
and another $10-20 billions per year will soon come from Chrome OS and its app store…
just add the upcoming Google Music and Google TV to understand, that, within 5 years, over 90% of the Web will be in Google’s hands, while, Microsoft, Apple, RIM, etc. (assuming they will still exist in 2015…) will have only a niche of this market
WHY ARE THE GOOGLE’S COMPETITORS SO INCREDIBLY STUPID??????
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Lots of noise around how google is behind in market share. Facebook is a power house without a doubt and so are the other social media companies. Google’s investment in Zynga explains how google is relatively slow to gain market share in this area.
Flipboard is said to be the next big thing. Anytime a company raises $10.5M in Series A financing one needs to wonder what is going to happen.
Is search going to die? No way. Is the party going to cool off a little, probably.
It’s all very exciting if you ask me.
there are NO doubts that Google will soon enter heavily also in the Gaming and Music markets
Next big thing for them is “Cloud Computing” masssive market it will be…
Rival: MSFT
The internet is reinventing it self, this the era of content explosion. Any company that could provide a dynamic space for content “submission” and distribution will leave their mark. The floods of ” . extension’s ” will only encourage more and more people to type in to the browser. This mean .COM will emerge as the sole benedictor by passing google
bwahahaha. nice try fortune reporter. you wish there was shift.
special bulletin: google has most of the best minds in the biz. and as everyone seems to have noticed, quite a bit of critical mass. it really doesn’t matter if the trend is search or if it’s portal. search has served google well and they are here to stay.
if there are shifts, google will move with them. good luck trying to displace the 800 pound gorilla.
the internet is a facsinating experiment in public persuasion. i fail to be persuaded by this “news”.
push vs. pull. portals. search engines. we will always have both. two sides of same coin. same old story.
-1
As someone mentioned before “the internet is it’s infancy”. Just Google the term “Digital Physics”. Google is God!?
The guy says search is dead because he is pushing a concept/service that wants to do away with search. The problem with his idea is people don’t always stay the same, they want to search new things and ideas they come across. To think a portal site could give you everything you need and you never have to search again is ludicrous.
Interesting and feel mixed
Mike mccue is a powerhouse and a true player.
Guy knows his shit
Will be interesting to watch and judging on mikes batting average and experience anything is possible.
Search will never completely die as long as people remain curious, let’s just say it will die down exponentially to about half of what it is now in about 5 years. It will be completely dead in about 10 when quantum computers are in use and they anticipate and know things before you are even cognizant of them. Of course Google already knows this and is started to diversify “Google invested $38.8 million into 169.5 MW worth of wind projects” just this year! and they will be diversifying more in the coming months.
within few years there will only ONE way to stop Google: NUKES
flipboard appears to have failed to realise the reason we search is to find new sources of information and that most of u don’t own ipads 🙂
I have been predicting this change for a couple of years. Nothing on the Internet last forever.
I expect to see all the Goolge wish list projects disappear as they buckle down for the change. There will be brain leakage outward from Google also.
Change is inevitable with the Internet. It is dynamic and able to change overnight.
Good luck Google.
Google will Predict the Future.! This is from an article in Wired published just 2 days ago.
“The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.
The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.
The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.
The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science”
Further…
“Recorded Future strips from web pages the people, places and activities they mention. The company examines when and where these events happened (“spatial and temporal analysis”) and the tone of the document (“sentiment analysis”). Then it applies some artificial-intelligence algorithms to tease out connections between the players. Recorded Future maintains an index with more than 100 million events, hosted on Amazon.com servers. The analysis, however, is on the living web”
And this my friends is just the tip of the iceberg. It is theorized that Quantum Computers will actually be able to unravel the mysteries of the universe and tell us about the origin of man.
But that won’t be for another 15 years or so.
🙂
this fortune “article” is classic hype. domain report has it right.
mccue: “there is no need to do a search”
this is misleading (=hype). there is a need. someone still has to do a search. the correct statement is: “there is no need for *a user* to do a search”
the search is still being done. an index and cache of the social networking, photo, etc sites is built and then using user input, the index is searched and the files (sequences of bytes) retrieved. except in this case, someone else besides google and then the user are doing these steps. and perhaps user input is collected less frequently.
this is the essence of “web 2.0”: how much can we, web 2.0 company, do for users on *our* computers (web servers) before the user says “enough” and once again chooses to do these things themselves, using her own computer? the answer seems to be “a lot”. so i wouldn’t doubt mccue’s company could be a success.
this “let us do it for you” envelope will be pushed as far as it can go.
and it probably can be pushed much further than where we are now.
but when you let someone else’s computers (e.g. web servers) do work for you beyond simply serving up files, which is really all a web server (=a simple program) was meant to do, then you essentially are using a shared system, owned by someone else, to do your work. the more you do this, the less control you have. sometimes people like to feel in control.
many years ago, there was a backlash, so to speak, against the concept of immovable, time-shared computers, including restrictive mainframes like ibm’s. computer enthusiasts wanted more freedom. and today we’re all owners of portable computers (e.g. pc’s and mac’s). and these are now quite powerful e.g. for building indices and caches, like google’s. we don’t necessarily have to these personal computing resources with anyone. and much of the work that these “web 2.0” servers are doing for users could just as well be done by users themselves. personally, no matter how easy it may be to do, i could not launch a “web 2.0” company like the one discussed in good conscience.
the unflattering comments made by the founder of facebook about facebook’s early users that were made public a while back i thought were a good illustration of the potential weight of these “web 2.0” ventures on a person’s conscience, particularly ones that handle large volumes of personal information.
do these personal information gathering “web 2.0” startups need to have some clear regulations imposed on them to make them more reponsible, or at least accountable?
i think the answer will eventually be yes.
I believe search will ultimately undergo a transformation, but not the likes of that suggested by Fortune.com. Anticipating what information may prove beneficial to somebody surfing the Internet is not a substitute for search. I have an altogether different perspective on the future of search.
After more than ten years of watching the Internet evolve, what seems to have changed the least is the format in which Google returns its search results to the public. Sure, the process of search is much more sophisticated and the results more relevant, but the foundation upon which search is built hasn’t changed much. By way of analogy, if websites were individual lockers that lined the walls of an infinitely long room, then Google’s job has simply been that of indexing the locker contents and offering an educated guess as to which locker holds the content that most closely resembles the items being requested by the party at interest.
Well, it seems that Google is so busy finding new and better ways to index the contents of those lockers that it has altogether failed to notice that in the very same room are tables bearing stacks of so much additional information that it’s spilling onto the floor creating one gigantic heap of documents, files, folders, photos, etc. However, from Google’s vantage point, content that is kept outside the locker is not accessible as content at all, and therein lies the problem.
I’ve addressed this issue by suggested another way search might evolve:
http://www.squidoo.com/UnstructuredInformation
No doubt, the concept needs to be developed, but I think it gets the point across.
I took a look at your artcile DMS.
“user-friendly data mining tools” lol
Yes, eventually users may catch on. But first programmers, who enable the users, have to catch on. The GUI is keeping them all, programmers and users, dumbed down. I see programmers who are seen as “brilliant” in their craft who do not know how to do simple things without the use of some complex program, written by someone else. This puts them in a very weak position compared to someone who can accomplish the same things with a simpler method.
As for unstructed information, I agree this is the reality. I think the key to “unlocking it” for the user is understanding that “files” and so many other things that she takes on faith about the compter, are only abstractions. The “stuff” (text, image, sound, video, etc) is all just numbers. One huge heap of numbers. How could we organise that? We can break this heap into 1. “numbers that are addresses of other numbers” (i.e. where in the heap it is, a marker, so to speak) and 2. “the numbers that these addresses point to” (what the stuff is, and the stuff itself). That’s one way to do it. For most of us, the abstractions to organise this huge heap of numbers are someone else’s abstractions. And, unless we design our own system, we just go along and accept the system someone else has built. It works “good enough”.
Google has faced this issue of organisation from day one. They had to, because of the volume of data they had to store. They developed their own “filesystem” and their own methods of accessing the data. Needless to say, they have quite a bit of experience with this. Their systems have stood the test of time. That experience is valuable. Anyone can collect the same data as Google, and some have (you know who), but do they have the same amount of experience organising it?
If we, the lowly users, were all tasked with individually organising a large volume of information (e.g. a massive quantity of “addresses”), would each person do it precisely the same way? I doubt it.
As these volumes of data, i.e. heaps of numbers, we store continue to increase for each of us personally, the old abstractions like “a file”, “a folder”, etc. may not hold up so well, or “scale” to use the lingo. It may become “too much to handle” for the average user.
Either users begin to get a clue what exactly their data is (a huge heap of numbers) or perhaps they let someone else handle it for them. The simple “tools” have long been available to create personalised, new abstractions: different ways of manipulating the heap of numbers; it’s simply a matter of creative ideas and the effort of implementing them. Who is going to take the time to do that?
Google has been putting in substantial effort, because they have had a real need to do it. Their competitors are only more recently under similar “evolutionary pressures” and thus playing catch up.
When you type in a domain name or you search for or within a “file” or “directory”, you are referencing or searching through *numbers*. The numbers are the reality. Everything else is an abstraction. Numbers, unlike the abstractions, can be very precise.
Without all the fuzziness and ambiguity of using symbols with multiple meanings, if we used numbers instead (Dewey, ISBN, etc.), would registering domains would be unnecessary? Would search be easier?
Delete this post!
Yeah, Facebook. Satan with a pretty face and a big smile.
I clicked on a website yesterday, and never been there before (I’m sure), my facebook PROFILE photo came up, said I was logged in, had a link to “log out” that didn’t work. Asked me to “promote” the page I was looking at. Didn’t want to. Wasn’t sure if I was logged in, but I can tell you this:
Facebook is SELLING YOUR IP ADDRESSES AND YOUR PROFILE PICS, WITH YOUR NAME, TO ANY COMPANY THAT PAYS FOR IT.
Have fun!
It’s beyond privacy invasion (my Facebook prefs are all set to “privacy”). It’s blatant commercialism, invasion of privacy, and FB has accomplished so much, and reached so far into the world’s internet users with their “fun website” playing on our desires to reach old friends and share with all our friends our news, that even the most suspicious (me), still uses it.
But when you load up a webpage, either by accident or redirect, and see your profile photos and full name listed on the page, without you “registering”, then you know the “real game” of FB.
Lucifer rejoices.
About the article and replacement of search and domain names? Not going to happen in the next 10 years.