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Technology Review Explores Googles Quest to Index All Information
15 December 2004Technology Review's cover story "What's Next for Google: The search firm wants to organize all digital information. That means war with Microsoft" will be published in the January
2005 issue, and is now available on http://www.technologyreview.com. Technology Review magazine is published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The 6500-word analysis by notable technology writer Charles H. Ferguson investigates Google's drive to dominate the Internet search market, and archive huge amounts of digital media, including books.
Editor-in-Chief Jason Pontin is available for interview in Cambridge, Mass. MIT's ReadyCam is available for television interviews.
The key points of the story are:
* The Google Print announcement today represents another step toward
Google's stated ambition of "organizing the world's information." But,
it will be very difficult for any single company to dominate the search
market simply through incremental improvements in the range of material
they index. The winner will be the company that dominates search
standards, especially the tools (called application programming
interfaces, or APIs) that programmers at other companies can use to
build software or websites that take advantage of proprietary search
indexes. Microsoft made its fortune by establishing such standards for
operating systems and desktop software. If Google does not pursue this
strategy in the search realm, Microsoft will. In fact, Microsoft already
is.
* Microsoft and Google are wrestling for control of a very large market.
An organization that dominated search access to all types of digital
information, not just the information currently available on the web,
would stand to earn up to half a trillion dollars in cumulative revenue
over the next several decades, according to search-industry insiders
with whom Technology Review contributing writer Charles Ferguson spoke.
* Google does provide some APIs to outside programmers, but Ferguson calls
them "laughably limited, offering little functionality and contractually
restricting users to 1,000 queries per day." Late in 2004, Google
announced that it will provide APIs for its advertising systems and its
Google Deskbar tool. The magazine's coverage takes the view that these
are, at best, half-measures. Google needs to create open APIs that allow
easy access to its core search engine.
* Two Google employees, who asked not to be named, told Ferguson that
Google's leaders believe that the company's expertise in infrastructure
(meaning the management of hundreds of thousands of servers worldwide)
creates a competitive advantage more important than APIs or standards.
"This could be a major, even fatal, error," Ferguson writes. "Microsoft
can certainly obtain or cultivate the skills necessary to operate
large-scale computing infrastructures; indeed, it already operates MSN,
with nearly 10 million users.'
* What should Google do? "Given Microsoft's ferocity in the past, panic
might be a productive first step," writes Ferguson. "Google should
understand that it faces an architecture war and act accordingly. Its
most urgent task must be to turn its website into a major platform," as
other firms such as Amazon have already done.
Source: PR Newswire
All trademarks and copyrighted information contained herein are the property of their respective owners.
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