Google has the most established moat of all products and service available to society at this point in time, for the simple fact it is a precursor for it's constituents. Google is what currently holds the content on the web together, and the means of traversing from one place to another. While this alone provide what is needed to build a technology empire, the additional benefit of audience intelligence and transversial foot printing allows us to monitor the interests of society in real time. It is my belief that the queries in Google provide the most accurate representation of society as a whole.
Cuil's marketing campaign speaks to the engineering abilities of it's staff, and it's ability to compile large quantities of data. Google is simply in another game; delivering the most value to the end user, you know the concept... sometimes less is more. A convoluted search engine with irrelevant, but a high count of search results is just as useless as one that doesn't return results.
Our major concern is around the more disruptive technology, such as the recent developments in semantic search. While I remain confident that semantic search will never take the place of the PageRank algorithm, I do believe that semantic search is an untapped market. Unstructured data analysis has yet to be widely used in business intelligence solutions, but the power that it provides is clear even at stages this early. Microsoft's recent acquisition of Powerset will only be the first of many semantic search technologies.
My fear is that the market for semantic search will eventually outgrow the market for more traditional search engines. In response to this, Google has made several initiatives to be an early adopter and innovator in the area of semantic search. Early moves will include end-to-end solutions in the form of Google search servers with natural language processing capabilities and the ability to build and publish dashboards on the fly. Adobe will serve as a key partner, as we are utilizing their Flash format for publishing dashboards, and the Flex Builder application for extensibility work. The Eclipse IDE will provide a familiar environment for those who have utilized Eclipse for Java Development.
Google will also take on an aggresive industry awareness strategy, closing monitoring the developments of semantic search engines. Those on the top of our list this very day:
Hakia is built upon Yahoo's BOSS service, so they are seen as a source of innovation more than a threat to Google. TextWise recently followed suit and opened their semantic APIs up "the hacker" community. We believe their approach in approaching the hacker community will ward off anyone with the potential to build a viable business model around semantic search. Freebase is an interesting concept, looks to have hit a critical mass and caught the momentum it needs to sustain. While Google will continue to monitor activities of Freebase, they are not in our competitive space and are therefore seen as non-threatening.
CKLingo has some ground breaking work going on, but their restrictive search environment and dramatic learning curve will prevent any significant percentage of market share. Their strategy of serving as a showcase for Microsoft technology is an area of concern for us. If Microsoft were to take an interest and provide funding in the form of advertising dollars (similar to our move with Yahoo), the possibility of dedicated linguistic and UI/UX teams may serve detrimental to Google's long term business strategy.
In the advent that someone were to present a compelling case for semantic search, it will be Google's strategy to release technology currently in development as a service that compliments (not replaces) Google itself. We will continue developing the technology as quickly as possible while keeping it in small but very capable groups. This should keep the technology under wraps until we launch.
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