Archive: December, 2005

We’re launching a toolbar later this week. It’s designed for SEO’s , and people interested in search engines. It has a few nice features, and helps you run a quick review of your site.

I decided to include a Google DataCenter checker. The toolbar actually hits most of the active datacenters. At random, as part of testing, I selected 64.233.179.104 and 64.233.161.99. I noticed that for my query there were almost 5x the results in the first datacenter as compared to the second. So I ran a few checks on other datacenters. Quite a large variation in the number of results.

It seems that not only are the datacenters starting to flux again, but the size of the index is varying much more wildly than usual.

Query                         datacenter                  datacenter
                                 64.233.179.104         64.233.161.99

Spend Management   155,000,000                  68,500,000
Traffic Volume             70,900,000                  27,000,000
nasty quotes                  9,340,000                    2,820,000

I’ll be watching this over the next few days. We’ll also put the toolbar up for download shortly. Your comments will be welcome!

I’ve seen a few links in blogs I read to an interesting article in CNET today. It acknowledges that there still is a lot of room for growth in the search market space, with online advertising spend alone expected to grow by up to 80%. Even at that, online advertising will still be a fraction of offline advertising spends.

The article goes on to comment that another Google is unlikely, as the leaders get entrenched. I would agree: A new market leader in search engines is unlikely to emerge, (although I do know of some new technology which threatens to change the market dynamics). There are innovations out there, some in development, some in very quiet beta testing which can and do threaten Google’s position as “the king of all things search.”

Some of these innovations will be niche market players, some will be multi billion dollar operations (some quickly). I don’t know that any will be pure search engine companies. But I’m also not convinced that Google will think of itself as a search engine company at all 5 years out. A surprising number of their employees whom I’ve spoken to consider themselves to be part of a media company, an advertising agency, an advertising network, and a search engine second. Few think of their employer as first being a search engine.