Of Search Engines and Competition

Inter­est­ing post on the Wel­ling­ton Fin­an­cial blog. In short, sounds like they think the suc­cess of a new vc fin­anced search engine hakia is unlikely to be around very long. An excerpt.

But it really isn’t clear why the rest of us will rip out the Google tool­bars or Yahoo Fin­ance pages and con­vert to another aggreg­ator. Well, maybe we could stand t dump Yahoo Fin­ance.

You­tube, flickr and the like were serving a need. There’s no obvi­ous need for a bet­ter search engine. And if there is, Google has proven that they have a few bil­lion to invest on improve­ments and the cur­rency to acquire along the way.

imho the bet­ter ques­tion would be why not? chan­ging a search engine is about as hard as chan­ging your undies — either type it in or change your homepage. why even bother with a tool­bar? no idea about hakia but i do remem­ber yahoo, altav­ista, hot­bot and a couple of other engines that were at one time or another at the top of the heap.

rel­at­ively speak­ing, in terms of switch­ing costs from the user per­spect­ive a search engine isn’t close to most other things (e.g. oper­at­ing sys­tem, office applic­a­tions, etc.).

and sure, google has lots of coin. but at one point it didn’t. and there wasn’t exactly an absence of search engines when they popped up…

will it be a suc­cess? no idea. could it? why not? I’d cer­tainly use it if it’s bet­ter than google.

BTW, in case someone from WF is read­ing this here, tried leav­ing a com­ment, couldn’t as your captcha doesn’t seem to be work­ing and PS you might want to try hash­cash instead.

Update: and its not like Google hasn’t had its fair share of troubles lately.

related:

1. Of Search Engines and Com­pet­i­tion (Part II)
2. pre­ma­ture cuil punditing
3. arbit­rary elec­tronic search & seizure + cana­dian bor­der = ok
4. chrome a win­dows killer? i doubt it
5. from the “this is poten­tially very cool if it works” dept.