Tuesday, February 07, 2006
Google's Monopoly - Will we witness the end?
For many years Google could do no wrong. Everything it touched turned into gold and whatever services it offered, in addition to the search, were always better than the competition's services.
More than that, back then Google represented the little guy who made it, the one with the values, one we felt we could trust to maintain a start-up mentality rather than embrace corporate values as it grew.
The first time I was disillusioned with Google was just over two years ago when the Google Trademark Enforcement Team decided to get involved in (ridiculous) trademark disputes.
Then we found out that Google saves all our searches and that it abides to court orders and surrenders our search history. Then there was the whole gmail fiasco - scanning private emails to better direct ads at us - yeah, whatever you say.
The latest sour note was Google's collaboration with the Chinese government.
But what is one to do? Google is still the best darn search engine. A monopoly indeed!
Well, there seems to be some hope. A few new search engines that may become serious competitors:
More than that, back then Google represented the little guy who made it, the one with the values, one we felt we could trust to maintain a start-up mentality rather than embrace corporate values as it grew.
The first time I was disillusioned with Google was just over two years ago when the Google Trademark Enforcement Team decided to get involved in (ridiculous) trademark disputes.
Then we found out that Google saves all our searches and that it abides to court orders and surrenders our search history. Then there was the whole gmail fiasco - scanning private emails to better direct ads at us - yeah, whatever you say.
The latest sour note was Google's collaboration with the Chinese government.
But what is one to do? Google is still the best darn search engine. A monopoly indeed!
Well, there seems to be some hope. A few new search engines that may become serious competitors:
- New Ones:
- Lexxe - "a third generation Internet search engine with advanced Natural Language Processing technologies." That is, Lexxe tries to answer your questions directly from web pages. From Business Pundit.com - Lexxe Beats Google
- Hakia - "hakia is building the Web's first "meaning-based" search engine, one that will bring answers and meaningful results to questions on any topic."
- Meta search engines such as MetaCrawler used to be the "in" thing but faded with time. However, gada.be is offering an rss output for searches allowing users to be updated on their search items. Google doesn't provide that. (Yet?)
- Using the surfers to find better results:
- Wink, for example, is "a different search engine that determines relevance by what people indicate are the best links." Problem is that not many people have indicated yet.
