Digital Media Buzz > Google Squared: Entering a Crowded Search Engine Field?

Google Squared: Entering a Crowded Search Engine Field?

By Moria Byrne

There is a huge misconception circulating in the media about search engines: that they are all the same and competing for the same audiences.

According to Grant Cowell, CEO and creative director of Grantastic Designs and a guest writer for Search Engine Watch, flooding the market with the same narrow skill set would be counter productive and is the opposite approach of a successful search engine company. Cowell sees establishing a unique identity and diverse skill set as essential to a successful search engine company.

“Relevancy before monetization,” says Cowell in an article for Search Engine Watch. The priority of a search engine lies in providing relevant tools, working with a diverse group of vendors, partners and sales channels, constantly expanding repertoire of applications and easy-to-use applications presented in a unique way at a low cost.

Google recently introduced a new application to users: Google Squared. The application is an experimental search tool that collects facts from the web and presents them in an organized collection, similar to a spreadsheet. As business owners would be the most likely to buy paid services, the ability to not only search but organize this research is an indispensible tool. Google currently provides the most applications to help users organize their searches. Use of applications provides company revenue making Google one of the top search engine companies in the industry. The company searches online content based on overall importance and query-specific relevance using page ranking and hypertext analysis. “We write all algorithims and don’t reorder the search results without human moderation and curation,” says one Google industry source who asked not to be named.

Google isn’t releasing information on its traffic or accuracy percentage officially at this time. Google Squared and other pilot projects on the Google Labs page are applications still in their alpha phase. Google doesn’t place advertising on Google Squared among other experimental applications. Revenue comes from AdSense and AdWords. Company revenue also comes from offering its search technology to companies and from the sale of advertising displayed on Google and on other sites across the web. “Google Squared is a cool scalable way to have a product looking for data on the web and providing the information to the customer in a different way,” said the Google industry source.

Wolfram/Alpha is cited as a top contender to Google Squared. The company claims it has logged more than 150 million queries thus far. Wolfram/Alpha, on the other hand enables people to find information by asking the service questions. The company searches its own database for the information and curates the information in order to answer the customer’s questions. Wolfram/Alpha disputes media claims that its main function is as a search engine company.

“Wolfram/Alpha has never been interested in competing with search engine companies,” says John Ekizian of Wolfram/Alpha. Wolfram/Alpha describes itself not as a search engine but as a computational knowledge engine. Wolfram Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and a growing collection of data to compute the answer to user’s queries or calculations. The company admits to still being in the development process of being able to answer customers’ queries. Wolfram/Alpha currently has a rate of 25-percent fall through, or unsuccessful searches. “We don’t pretend to have enough data to find information on the Netherlands [for example]. We’ve loaded a lot of U.S. data, which is publicly available. It’s all already been curated,” Ekizian says.

The recently released Wolfram/Alpha hopes to improve increase traffic and competitive ranking as an important source for information. Yet, the company has a few obstacles. Company executives admit that sometimes they can’t claim credit for their successful searches as the information was taken from an old search created by another search engine. Also, another problem is that people will create their own applications using Wolfram/Alpha in combination with search engines such as Yahoo, Google and Bing. Therefore, the results are getting harder to measure. Google declined to comment as to whether this was also a problem for its company. “The information is eschewed,” Ekizian says.

Another contender for top search engine is Bing. This is Microsoft’s modification of its search engine focused on simplifying the experience of consumer research. Microsoft found that 66 percent of consumers used search to help them make decisions. Therefore, Microsoft designed Bing as a quick go-to source for “daily routine searches and in order to accomplish tasks, including making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition or finding a local business.” Bing targets a diverse audience but focuses on consumers looking for businesses or business-related applications. The most popular applications are the integration of Microsoft’s Cashback into Bing’s shopping section and Bing’s Maps for Enterprise. Developers and webmasters can also create mashups of Bing API and Bing Maps. Users can also track search trends at xRank and Hitwise,among others. According to Hitwise, Bing has taken a 6.63-percent share of search in June.

Meanwhile, Google has also excelled in releasing countless applications for all kinds of users: families, individuals, schools, non-profits, small businesses, international corporations, etc. Applications are accessible by mobile phone, personal computer and online. Users can create video, websites, documents, chat or manage meetings/calendars online. Google’s popularity is aided by its diverse line of products and constant streams of new products. Few search engines have more than a handful of applications to their credit.

The misperception is that launching many products at the same time means that Google isn’t putting enough energy into its mission to improve searchable data engines. A representative explained that this is how Google operates. It creates products and launches them at a rapid pace to test them with a live audience.

Amar V. Bhide, visiting professor at Harvard Business School and author of The Origins and Evolution of New Businesses, claims that this approach to business is a growing trend among start-up businesses, especially in certain business sectors due to the climate of the industry. “Some new businesses start out with just the right model and the right team,” Bhide says. “But many startups in new and rapidly changing industries don’t always get it right. Success requires a process of opportunistic adaptation that cannot be easily executed as a public company.”

Other businesses were more cautious about releasing a finished product such as Microsoft. The company has released few new products until this past year. Many industry leaders believe that Microsoft’s slow approach to releasing new products and a new search engine was a bad business decision. Whereas, Wolfram/Alpha intends to create an entirely new niche market therefore there isn’t any need to push out products quickly to grab the fleeting attention of consumers.

Regardless of relentless branding campaigns, users influence where advertisers and business owners spend their money. In a recent Media Metrix poll, ComScore ranked Google as the site with the most searches (9.5 billion searches throughout the month) followed by Microsoft (3 billion) and Yahoo (1.2 billion). Google was also the only major search to gain market share in April.

Moria Byrne is a freelance journalist and editor. Her work has been featured in: Baltimore Business Journal, Maryland Daily Record, The Jewish Times and The Narragansett Times.