Topix CEO Rich Skrenta thinks someone out there can compete with Google, and he offered suggestions on how that might happen (hint: think vertically).
Beating The Unbeatable Google
Choose your poison: Google in search or Google in advertising. If you've ever heard of the phrase , picking a competitive ground with Google looks more like no choice at all.
Skrenta thinks differently, even though it was he who suggested
Kind of tosses the 'how to beat Google' theme out the window straightaway. "You need both a great product and a strong new brand," he writes. "Both are hard problems." The shoemaker Nike demonstrated this. Over the years as Phil Knight and company built the brand, it took quite a while before they were confident enough to put the swoosh on their products like hats and shirts without the word 'Nike'. So you can't beat Google on search. You can't beat them on brand; Google is a dictionary word that to Internet users means search. It's like traveling in the South and ordering a soda at lunchtime. Everything is a Coke, even if it's a Sprite or a Mr. Pibb. Where next? Skrenta suggested the vertical approach without coming out and calling it that: Keeping that approach in mind goes along with Skrenta's later points: users tend to want to type two words in a box, and they aren't interested in fancy-schmancy "clusters, or tags, or categories, or directory tabs, or pulldowns. Ever." Beating Google? Probably not going to happen right away. The winners in search will probably be the hyper-focused verticals, which makes sense. When creating an online business, entrepreneurs try to fill a niche. Search should work out the same way.You need to position your product to sub-segment the market and carve out a new niche. Or better, define an entirely new category. See
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