You’ve probably noticed that Google doesn’t work as well as it used to. Instead of finding good links on the first page or two of a search, you now have to page through 5 or 6 pages until you get to the good stuff. I don’t know why this is, unless it’s a combination of the size of the Web and the number of ways that people have found to trick the search into ranking their pages higher than they should be ranked.
Whatever the reason, it’s apparent that Google hasn’t addressed the problem with its core product, despite the merry time it’s having building marginal add-ons to basic search. And the company has grown so large it’s considered invulnerable. It reminds me of IBM in the mainframe days, or Alta Vista before Google.
While Google is sitting on its laurels, the rest of the tech world isn’t, and the Silicon Valley’s golden company may soon be facing some competition from some former classmates of Page and Brin who’re building a more sophisticated search engine:
If there’s anyone itching to take on Google, it is the two Indian guys who went to Stanford with Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Meet Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan, two of the co-founders at Junglee, and who twice seriously considered acquiring Google in its early days, but decided their friend Brin was too bold, if not arrogant, to deal with.
Now they plan to officially launch an ambitious search engine company, Kosmix at the Demo conference to begin the week of Feb 6 in Phoenix. They’ve also raised $7.4 million in venture capital.
They are making an audaciously risky bet that they can crack the code on a vexing problem in search: finding the meaning, or at least the topic of a Web page. “This is an unsolved problem on the Web,” says Harinarayan, from his office perched on the seventh floor of a Mountain View high-rise. His window commands a sweeping view of the valley, stretching out over toward the Googleplex, just three miles away.
Their search structures results by analyzing the context around the key words, something Google should have already done by now.
We may shortly see another example of how fleeting fame can be in this valley.