|
|
|
|
Clusty and Google 11 October 2004
“Search will look more like the magazine business than the soda market.”
Computer Scientist Oren Etzioni, The New York Times
Over the last several months, a number of new internet search engines have become available that organize their results in different ways from the web-page listings of Google. A company affiliated with Carnegie-Mellon University called Vivisimo, for example, launched a search tool called “Clusty” on 1 October. Clusty is so-named because it clusters information in a way that is designed to make it more useful.
Comparing Clusty and Google
On Google, if you type in “Janet Leigh,” looking for information on the film actress who passed away recently, you’ll get 324,000 results on the web.
Clusty is less comprehensive than Google – it returns 65,000 web pages from the same search on “Janet Leigh.” But the Clusty site also provides a set of folders that organize some of the search results into clusters of information related to the actress -- biographies, the “shower scene” in Psycho, posters.
Search Tool Comparisons
Clusty doesn’t cover as many web pages as Google, and it’s not nearly as popular. Clusty’s site is ranked 42,000th in terms of popularity. Google’s rank is four.
Clusty isn’t trying to be better or more popular than Google. Rather, its goal is to get a little bit of Google’s market, along with the ad revenues that come with it.
Google has demonstrated the power and profit of targeted ads. Its business approach and “look and feel” are easy to duplicate, and Clusty does so. Aside from the clustering feature, all other aspects of Clusty seem quite similar to Google. There are sections for news and images, as well as sponsored results from companies such as Amazon and E-Bay.
Clusty is not the only new search engine on the internet. Amazon has launched a search engine called A9, which has its search results “enhanced by Google.” A9 provides very similar information to Google in a slightly different format. There are sponsored links in A9, and the site gives results from the Amazon catalog in addition to searching the web.
Competing in Search
Google’s business model makes it vulnerable to search engine competition. First, Google’s business itself is not very sticky. There’s no reason, aside from habit and past experience, to always use Google as your search engine.
Google’s main source of search revenue comes from click-throughs, so any rival search engine that can attract viewers to its site, and not to Google’s, represents potential lost revenue for Google.
For advertisers, there’s no cost to listing on several search sites, since payment to the search engine varies with volume. In addition to eBay and Amazon, Clusty features ads from companies like Hewlett Packard and Colgate Palmolive. Big advertisers will sponsor links on low volume sites.
Will many users switch from Google? Right now, it’s not clear when to use a site like Clusty or A9, and when to use Google. Until the new entrants make it clear and easy, there will be costs and risks from switching, and most people will stick with Google as “good enough” for their results.
The new competition in search targets niches rather than the mass market. Google’s initial success has been in the mass market based on its superior search technology – compared to earlier sites like Altavista or Excite, Google provides better results for most people most of the time. Now that Google has raised the standard, the emerging basis of competition will be less about accuracy of results and more about the way these results are organized and formatted to fit particular needs and tastes.
"The competition has shifted from crawling the Web and returning an answer quickly to adding value to the information that has been retrieved." Oren Etzioni in The New York Times
Clusty and A9 are niche products – special interest magazines -- that indicate a change in the nature of search engine innovation. We might expect the search market to fragment into a variety of different approaches, enabling a variety of users to get more value from the information retrieved.
More Information:
1. Search Engine History: http://www.searchengineworld.com/engine/players.htm 2. John Markoff’s review of Clusty: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/30/technology/30search.html
3. Here’s the Clusty site: www.clusty.com 4. Here’s the A9 site: www.a9.com 5. James Fallows’ review of A9: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/business/yourmoney/03techno.html
|
|
All content on this site licensed under a Creative Commons License.
|
