February 25, 2004

More than 30 percent of the time, people conducting searches online are trying to return to a website they've already seen, said Grant Ryan, chief executive of Eurekster Inc.

Ryan thinks search sites should highlight the Web pages a user has visited before, instead of just giving all users the same results for a particular subject. Grant Ryan is convinced Internet searches should be more than "one size fits all."

Ryan said the Eurekster site, launched last month, does so by providing users with "personalized" responses. If a user finds a Web page useful and stays on it for a while, it will come up at the top of the list the next time the user searches the same subject.

Eurekster also lets users share these results with close groups of friends or colleagues whom they identify through social-networking technology, which is also used on sites where people meet each other through their friends. Before the end of the year, Ryan plans to unveil a more specialized product: searches designed for particular topics, and not for general use.

For instance, a search product centered solely on fly-fishing might be installed on the Internet site of a fly-fishing store, or a search on breast cancer could be built into a health care Web page.

"You'll be able to have different views of the Internet," Ryan said. "Adding personalization to search is almost an inevitable thing." Inevitable, perhaps, and welcome. For years, search providers have battled to make results more relevant. Now, as competition heats up in this market, a crop of new technologies that make search results more sophisticated is challenging leaders such as Google Inc.

The search business is booming. In the late 1990s, many executives saw the business as a commodity -- a necessary feature for a Web site, but a static one that didn't make money. Their view has changed.

Search advertising totaled $2.3 billion in the United States last year, and the market is growing rapidly. Only last week, initial public offering candidate Google expanded the reach of its search engine by another 1 billion Web pages, bringing the total number of pages it indexes to 4.28 billion. It continues to test its Froogle shopping search service and its Orkut social-networking site. Google is also preparing an e-mail service.

Yahoo Inc. also is moving full throttle. Last week, it shifted from repackaging Google's search results to using a combination of its own search formulas. The company is promising new personalization and local search features in coming weeks.

Microsoft Corp. also plans to release its own search technology, probably later this year.

Experts and executives said they anticipate searching on the Web will evolve rapidly. Many smaller firms are dramatically rethinking the way search is conducted, directed and displayed. The market is "going to evolve away from search engines to answer engines," said Chris Sherman, editor of the industry newsletter SearchDay, referring to techniques designed to better understand what users are seeking.

Peter Norvig, Google's director of search quality, said the company is aware of the innovation taking place. "There's a lot of good ideas going around and we're looking at them all."

Google is considering the idea of personalization and in the future could move toward "classifying results" to make them better organized, Norvig said. It also could offer suggestions to improve searching. "I think you'll see more and more of that in the next year."

Many startups believe searching is too broad and unstructured. They point to the popularity of travel search sites, the local listings of doctors and dentists now online, or the search aides on a site like Kbtoys.com.

On Kbtoys.com, for instance, searching for a "toy car" brings up a display on the left side of the screen that offers users a way to narrow the search, said Steve Papa, chief executive of Endeca Technologies Inc., a private, Cambridge, Mass., company that supplied the technology. By clicking on "boy," or "girl," the age of the child or a price range for the product, search results are refined.

Big search sites such as Google and Yahoo will be difficult to dislodge. Google handles more than one-third of U.S. Web searches, and when it took off three years ago, its popularity spread by word of mouth. "I'm not sure that's possible this time around," said Chris Moore, a principal at the venture-capital firm Redpoint Ventures.

"It's really their game to lose at this point," said SearchDay editor Sherman. But, "I think there's room for more than just Google" in the market, he said.

This prospect has market challengers racing ahead. Last week, Feedster LLC, a Newton Centre, Mass., search engine for online blogs and news sites, showed off software that can periodically send blog and news updates to a person's computer.

It is a "mass customization" of search, and "we have to be the best at our kind of search in order to survive," said Chief Executive Scott Rafer. Last week, Yahoo also said it had integrated a blog update service into its search results.

Search companies also are looking hard at local searches. A recent survey by market researchers Kelsey Group and BizRate.com found 25 percent of 5,000 online buyers interviewed were seeking merchants near home or work, a high percentage.

Google's efforts at local search have improved since the first of the year, even though the local search link is still found on its Google Labs page, a spot for technologies under development. "They are delivering a lot more relevant local data," said Greg Sterling, a Kelsey Group director.

For instance, typing in "watch repair" and "Memphis" generates a list of shops, a map of the city with their approximate locations and links to their Web sites.

But startups are trying to stay one step ahead. Groxis Inc., of Sausalito, Calif., announced last week that its Grokker search organization software works with results from Google. The program organizes search results into categories that are displayed on a computer screen in bubbles. Click on a bubble and it expands to show another level of relationships between search items.

A new version of the software planned for mid-March will allow three-year-old Grokker to search and organize eBay Inc. auction postings. "Grokker will be one tool in the arsenal" of making search more relevant, said Chief Technology Officer Jean-Michel Decombe. And Google so far hasn't matched it.

Source: MLive.com

        

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