Unless Google spectacularly messes up I can't see them being challenged. People don't just search for things, they now 'google' them. They may well lose market share if the others get their act together, but I can see them being #1 for a very long time to come.
MattUK: people said the same about other SE's until G came along. The draw back now is that to develop a new SE is going to take a considerable amount of cash. There are some companies around with the capital to try it, but I can't see anyone making a successful business case for it. I could be an interesting case study for some kind of grid. That would lower a major amount of the expense - actually having enough systems around to crawl the entire net, and analyse the results. I'm not exactly up on how grids work, but I'd say it's a feasable way of building the actual databases.
There are several interesting patents being filed some of which could build a much better Google but the question is how much financial backing they have to pull it off.
True, But Google pretty much has the best formula for the results. What you think can be added to make it better?
A decentralised peer-to-peer powered search engine would be interesting, this could be implemented at a very low cost, so long as you can accumulate enough users (read: resources) needed.
ST, exactly. To build a brand new challenger to G would take a massive amount of capital. MS have the capital (possibly Yahoo) and both have the infra in place. It remains to be seen whether either will ever become a viable G alternative. I don't think a true P2P SE would work. Imagine having a chunk of your results disappear just because someone switched of their systems. The grid could be used for distributed crawling/analysis though. For example: Main systems keep a database of urls to crawl. user system gets requests a block of urls, crawls that url and then analyses the results. The results of this analysis are then sent to another master system which incoporates the into the search databases. That I think would work. Whether it's cost effective is another matter
Distributed computing... like the SETI project. I could see that lowering the need alot for hardware and bandwidth. IF you could get enough PC's opting in, it could be possible to have the freshest results. That would be an edge.
In the near future there won't be only one SE as dominant as Google. MSN and Yahoo will gain some ground and even things out a bit.
Microsoft has windows with default MSN search engine. Most people who are not using computer a lot will use MSN as search engine. MSN will gain some ground. Though currently yet it looks unstable
Like others have said, I have a feeling that Yahoo and MSN will probably gain on Google a bit (personally I've started using Yahoo for searches), but I feel it's unlikely that a newcomer is going to take Googles crown. I've read a few articles in newspapers that trumpet blinkx as the next big thing - but IMHO I can't see it becoming an industry giant.
You can nevr tell what will be the giant in the future. Take standard oil. that was the gold crown of oil companies at the turn of the century. I too see msn and yahoo starting to chip at the google kingdom! maybe we will see a new word emerge out of this yahoogagooglian! Do you Yahogoogle?
That distributed crawling idea is pretty good. I think it'd work really well. You'd still need a powerhouse of a datacenter to serve the queries though...
If you guys want Google to survive in the search business then you better start supporting "open source Linux" & MAC OS because when M$ comes out with browserless search Google could be in real trouble if 90% of computer users keep using Windows OS. The search engine wars are now the OSwars guys. Google knows this and that is why they support Firefox and have created Google desktop and hard drive search and other web applications like Gmail and purchased Blogger. Now get on with it and get involved with linux. www.mepis.com is a great start. http://www.mepis.org/node/5188 www.linux.com http://www.linuxselfhelp.com/
opss.. sorry wrong topic guys.. my connection seems having a problem. by the do you a site which will guide me using linux?
When it offers something even close to what I get with windows and all of the applications that run under windows, as much as I hate windows (esp. xp) it's what I'll be using.
What about an "open source" search engine? If Linux can challenge Windows and Firefox can win over millions from IE, why not do the same for search? The advantage from the user's point of view is that they would know exactly how this search engine determined the relevancy of their results. With all the talk now about bias in search results, I think many people would be very interested in this kind of information. Put that together with distributed computing, and I think you have a very interesting idea.