Comments(2)

Comment by Falafulu Fisi at 4:14 am on 29 March 2007

I think that it will be very hard for any newcomer to beat Google. Only Microsoft has the capability to do so, with its massive financial resources that it is funneling thru to its R&D. Google guards its research and never publish it (as well as Yahoo), while Microsoft does publish its researches in several journals. From what I have seen in publications from MS Asia Research Division, they have produced some very interesting work (completely new). I think that some of this research work related to web-search engine had gone into development of MS Live Search, such as Block-Level Link Analysis and Exploiting the Hierarchical Structure for Link Analysis. Microsoft (USA) had recruited this guy from Auckland University School of Engineering to do research in his field, which is semi-supervised classification (ssc). SSC is quite new area that has emerged in recent years, and it has a huge a huge potential for application in web-search engine for page topical classification, (ie, cluster pages that have similar topic rather than key-words) which is something not available yet. But sure, scientists at Google & Yahoo are also reading the same journals as Microsoft scientists, so they would definitely be aware of emerging new algorithms.

Web search engines are going to improve with new algorithms keep emerging from industrial and academic researches, which are publicly available in different computing literatures. This free online journal is one which publishes research work relating to web search & internet , Internet Mathematics. Another interesting paper that has came out a year or two ago, was Topical Hypertext Induced Topic Selection (TOPHITS), where this paper is available for download here (Higher-order web link analysis using multilinear algebra). TOPHITS can now combine link-based search , such as PageRank or HITS plus content-search, which is not available yet.

Only Microsoft can beat Google, in the long run, if they can aim to do just that.





Comment by Paul at 1:58 pm on 29 March 2007

Fisi,

This kind of depends on how you define what Google (and MS)for that matter do. Google imho isn’t a search company, they’re and advertising company. Not new. How is MS going to beat that? they’re spread way to thin trying to protect their core business, while “managing” the disruption that SaaS brings with their live initative.

The fact the google serves up more relevant advertising messages than search results is their current differentiator. They’ve got tonnes of other initatives on the go but nothing generating more than 1% of their revenue currently.

So who could beat them? A competitor who is tier 3 in their list coupled with a disruptive technology will.





Name:(required) Email address (required, will not be published): URL (optional): Comment:

Notify me of followup comments via e-mail