Searchme.com and other search engines

 Last Moday Mr Gallacher mentioned in class that companies are shifting resources from banner-like ads to search ads. This is great news for Google, since they have 73% of world market share (much higher in Europe) in ads search.

It seems that nobody is threatening Google’s future in the short term. Google’s reputation as one of the best employers makes the company attract some of the best engineers from all over the world. The company devotes 70% of its resources to the search business, which is making its search algorithms more and more sophisticated. This is creating huge entry barriers for other companies. Try to compete heads on with Google is something almost no one will probably dare to do soon.

 
However, economics theory explains that if an industry generates profits, new companies will flourish and capture part of the stake. I’ve been looking to different strategies that try to capture part of the value that search is adding.

 
- Localization: some companies have decided to target only certain countries. This seems to work better in countries where the language or alphabet is very different from ours. For example Beidu has around 62% market share in China.

 
- Vertical search or domain-specific search: they specialize in a particular sort of content. For example http://ahzing.com/ has several engines targeting categories.

- User interface: who said search innovation is dead? Have a look into this website in beta version: www.searchme.com Really cool, isn’t it?