Microsoft's pursuit of Yahoo ended on Saturday. The $48 billion bid, came after Microsoft had invested untold billions of dollars over the years into unprofitable and undermanaged online services, while Google and a host of smaller players found a windfall in online advertising.
The software giant's share of Internet search queries was a mere 9.4% in March, while Google Inc. had a 59.8% share and Yahoo a 21.3% share. Buying Yahoo was supposed to help reverse struggling Microsoft's online services by adding size--in particular, a mass of consumers and advertisers--to what Microsoft already had.
In a letter to Microsoft employees Saturday, CEO Steve Ballmer pledged to "pursue partnerships and investments" to expand Microsoft's scale in online services while investing in the engineering behind the services. Microsoft's next course of action will likely be to try to form a competitive advantage through tie-ups with other Internet companies that could pull more consumers and advertisers to its Internet services.
As Google continues to leverage its huge marketshare advantage by increasing advertisers' costs, Microsoft has an opportunity to become the umbrella for a stable of many specialty search engines...at a much lower cost-per-click (CPC) price than Google offers.
Here is why specialty search engines are the next best thing:
BOOMER SEARCH ENGINE: www.cRANKy.com got its name because the creators say that many older users get cranky when they use more traditional search engines. Launched January of 2007, this site is run by the same folks who launched www.Eons.com.
In the age of Google, being special increasingly requires standing out from the crowd online. Some of the "un-Googleables" say being crowded out of search results actually carries a professional and financial price. That's because people increasingly rely on search engines to find things they want to read, music they want to hear, people and companies they want to do business with.
U.S. Internet users conduct hundreds of millions of search queries daily. About 7% of all searches are for a person's name, estimates search engine www.Ask.com. More than 80% of executive recruiters said they routinely use search engines to learn more about candidates, according to a recent survey by executive networking firm ExecuNet. Nearly 40% of individuals have used search engines to look up friends or acquaintances with whom they'd lost touch, according to a Harris Interactive survey commissioned by Microsoft Corp.'s MSN unit.
Roughly 30% of the 7 billion-plus Web searches performed in the U.S. each month relate to individuals. A Google search for an individual may return tens of thousands of links in milliseconds, but it's hard to tell unless you click on one if it's the person you're looking for. The results list won't distinguish between, say, leadership coach John Agno, Microsoft executive John Agno or Honolulu Police Sgt. John Agno.
That's where Jay Bhatti's company, Spock, comes in. His people-specialized search engine scans social networks and other sites where people regularly post information about themselves and others. It then pulls that information into a concise summary about a person, such as his occupation, interests, age, marital status, and hometown. A click on the summary reveals related Web sites and known associates.
Professional networking site LinkedIn Corp. says its members' profile pages often turn up high in Google search results when the users opt to make the pages accessible to the public. "Any time you can distinguish yourself with a distinctive name or a distinctive characteristic that sticks out in people's minds, that's going to be the best solution," says Matt Cutts, a Google software engineer.
The Semantic Web Future
Moving from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, the information in documents will have to be turned into data that a machine can read and evaluate on its own. Only then will computers be able to take over tasks we now do by hand.
The term "semantic Web" first gained prominence in a 2001 article in Scientific American. The article described software agents roaming across the Web, making travel arrangements and doctor appointments and muting the stereo when the telephone rings. This vision couldn't be achieved with today's Internet. For the semantic Web to work, online information needs to be computer-readable with enough metadata attached to it to make it meaningful.
Nova Spivack, grandson of Peter Drucker, had a vision for Radar Networks that grew out of conversations he had with Drucker in the summer of 2001, about four years before the professor-coach's passing. "We would meet for two hours a day and talk about organizations vs. organisms," Spivack says. Drucker was particularly interested in what he called the intelligence of organizations. "My grandfather helped me think about group minds," Spivack says. "How groups get more intelligent and how connections play into that."
In a sense, Radar Networks' engine allows a person to build a database around any question, project or interest s/he may have and then start looking at it from different perspectives. "You start to see new ways to look at the information," Spivack says. "What gets me excited is what we can do when we have billions of objects and 10 million people using them."
Radar Networks hopes to be the engine powering all that, providing a massive, meaning-filled Web of data that can be infinitely poked and prodded and leveraged. The company will make its money from advertising and premium subscriptions; the basic service will be free.
Today, Radar Networks, Google Base and Flickr are the first data islands to pop into public view. Larger islands are being formed by corporations and government agencies. Many more will rise. Spivack is counting on those islands to eventually coalesce. That's when the future vision becomes reality.
Sources, BusinessWeek, July 30, 2007, Business 2.0, July, 2007, The Wall Street Journal, May 8, 2007 and May 5, 2008