Search To Portal To Search To Portal Yet Again
from the when-do-we-go-back-to-search? dept
Danny Sullivan is pointing out that everything old seems new again in the search world. It wasn't that long ago, of course, that people thought of Yahoo, Lycos and others as "search engines," even if that wasn't really the case (especially with Yahoo, which was never really a search engine). Then, once they realized they weren't making money in search, they all went portal. Of course, in doing so, they took their eye off the search ball, and along came Google to fill that role - and turn it into a money maker. So, suddenly, the big portals realized they needed to get back into search, and suddenly everyone is becoming a search engine again. Of course, before that process has really gone anywhere, Google has started announcing all sorts of portal-like moves and Yahoo! is (amazingly) talking about how they're "more than a search engine" - as if they ever were just a search engine. All this really makes clear is that there may be room for new search engines still. Already, people are buzzing about things like ObjectSearch and Gigablast. Yup, this new world, looks quite similar to the world a few years back. Hopefully the companies today have learned from the mistakes in the past.
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No Subject Given
If I were in charge, I would scale down, get rid of units that aren't producing, and really compete with google. Although, google's going to be just as bad in a few years. The difference... there isn't much, but at least google is trying to create money makers. Don't know. We'll need to wait and see.
This holiday season will be interesting though...
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Re: No Subject Given
Well, if you look at the past two years, that's exactly what they did. They got rid of a ton of people, killed off a bunch of business lines, combined into just a few units, and bought up every major Google competitor. So.. it looks like they did exactly what you said.
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