Is Every New Search Engine Just a Feature?

January 18, 2006

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Is Every New Search Engine Just a Feature

Glancing over press for a new social search engine,

This isn't new. Again, poor Jonathan Abrams (HotLinks.com), and the founders of Backflip.com came up with something called shared bookmarking or social bookmarking back during the Web 1.0 bubble. Same idea. Good idea. Went bust financially, unfortunately. And many of the creators got criticized, defunded, and forgotten all too quickly.

If it's a way of improving search relevance, then leaders like Yahoo and Google will simply build it into what they do.

Or, they'll buy you out.

So, the complaint that Web 2.0 companies are mostly about building and flipping to Yahoo, Microsoft, or Google (let's not forget eBay and Amazon), is not without validity, it seems to me.

Have we reached the stage where Internet functionality and search are largely controlled by Borg-like brands? To beat them, you'd have to be pretty unconcerned about money (they'll wave $50 million in your face to acquire what you have without even breaking a sweat... try not to hug and kiss them when they do). And you'd have to have something pretty revolutionary. At a high level, no major new brand has emerged in this space since 1999, when we began watching it.

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