Mp3 search web

On the Internet, the shortest distance between two points is a well-conceived search query. In fact, these days most "surfing" entails a hurried perusal of the first few sites returned by a search engine as you quickly try to find exactly what you're looking for. Search is the glue that holds the Web together, and while the media hype surrounding Google's initial public offering might make you think that the technology is fully baked and capitalized upon, in fact things are just beginning to get interesting.

A multi-billion-dollar industry has grown up around search technology. Competition is fierce as household-name companies battle for supremacy on the high end even as a slew of smart, scrappy start-ups vie to become the next Google or, failing that, innovate their way to niche success. The technology is changing and penetrating corporate life in ways that might surprise you. It's transforming the way companies--including yours, most likely--advertise and market their brands, products, and services. If that's not enough, search also promises to change the way companies create, store, and share information, both on individual PCs and over corporate networks.

What seems like a simple utility is actually a multifaceted IT issue worthy of inclusion in corporate strategy. Below you'll find five solid hits that will get you up to speed on the world of search.

THEY'RE FEELING LUCKY (AND SMART)

From its humble beginnings 14 years ago, when a McGill University student named Alan Emtage invented the first search tool, Internet search has grown into a bona fide industry: market watchers peg the industry's revenue at about $4 billion. Safa Rashtchy of securities firm Piper Jaffray & Co. expects search-related revenue worldwide to top $11 billion by 2008.

Not one penny of that comes directly from the millions of searches that you and everyone else on the Web conduct each day. Basically, Web search is the content that delivers an audience to advertisers in various and increasingly sophisticated ways.

Most search today is offered in one of two ways: either through stripped-down, search-only sites such as Google that use what's called algorithmic search (complex formulas to determine the "best" results for any given keywords) or through content sites or portals, including Microsoft's MSN and Yahoo, many of which also use algorithmic techniques and/or indexing of sites by category.

Google, of course, has proven such a success that its name is a verb. Currently generating almost $1 billion in revenue, with net income of $106 million, the company employs more than 1,900 people (known as Googlers), including two massage therapists and a former neurosurgeon (now an operations manager). Used by 46 million people a month, its engine searches some 6 billion items, including nearly 4.3 billion Web pages, 880 million images, 845 million Usenet messages, and 1,000 mail-order catalogs.

But Google is hardly resting on its laurels, and its rash of recent innovations gives some indication of how much work remains to be done in shortening the distance between searchers and what they search for. New services include Froogle, a comparison-shopping search engine; Search by Number, which can be used to track packages, search for products and patents by UPC codes and patent numbers, or find area codes; and Google Local, which finds stores and services in a given zip code. The company is also rumored to be developing software that will search information stored on PCs.

TURF GUYS

Google's success is being challenged by other large companies, mainly Yahoo and Microsoft, and to a lesser extent Ask Jeeves, AOL, and Amazon. And then there are the smaller companies.

Unlike Google, neither Microsoft nor Yahoo is primarily a search company. Microsoft, of course, is the leading maker of PC software, with a virtual lock on the PC operating-system and office-applications markets, while Yahoo operates the leading Web portal, attracting nearly 275 million visitors a month.

To catch up and compete with industry-leading Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have relied on a combination of acquisitions and in-house development. Yahoo's buying spree includes Inktomi (one of the original search pioneers), AltaVista (another early search engine), Overture (a leader in commercial search services), and Kelkoo (a European comparison-shopping engine). More pointedly, earlier this year Yahoo severed its ties with Google, which had supplied the actual search-engine component on Yahoo's site, and instead rolled out its own search algorithm.

Microsoft, meanwhile, has signaled its seriousness by creating a vice president of search position and developing a line of search-related products and services incorporating its own algorithmic search engine. Among those now being tested are automated services to capture news (tentatively to be called MSN Newsbot), Web logs (tentatively MSN Blogbot), and natural-language queries and answers (tentatively MSN Answerbot). "Consumers say that 50 percent of their search results are still not relevant," says Karen Redetzki, an MSN product manager, "so we see a huge opportunity."

Amazon.com, though not primarily a search company, has built its powerful E-commerce business around proprietary, and highly sophisticated, search functionality that helps shoppers find what they want fast. Its latest feature, called Search Inside the Book, lets visitors use a search engine to peer inside the pages of more than 100,000 books. Amazon is also working to compete in two new areas: licensing and comparison shopping. In late 2003 it announced A9, a separately run subsidiary that will develop E-commerce search tools for use by both Amazon and licensees; the company launched its beta site in April. And a year ago, it formed Amazon Services to license its search technology to other E-commerce sites. Customers include Target, Toys "R" Us, and the National Basketball Association's online store.

But Exhibit A in the case that search is still very much an evolving market may well be Ask Jeeves. The company was founded in 1996, nearly disappeared during the dot-com bust, and was revived in 2001 thanks to, oddly enough, the acquisition of other search-related companies and the sale of part of its business to, you guessed it, a search company (of sorts, see below). With 28 million visitors monthly, Ask Jeeves is not putting the scare in Google just yet. But its CEO, Steve Berkowitz, sees an opportunity to compete via technological differentiation. Unlike other search sites, Ask Jeeves allows visitors to type in natural-language queries--for example, "What's the weather in San Francisco?"--in addition to keyword queries. Citing surveys that show the average Web visitor uses 2.5 search engines a month, Berkowitz says, "Our opportunity is to become the only viable alternative to the others."

THINKING OUTSIDE THE SEARCH BOX

Search continues to be an engine of growth, and start-ups are plentiful. Many have real customers, real sales, and real working capital. Nearly all are bursting with clever ideas, products, and services.

Among these new-generation search vendors, none entertain fantasies of competing with Google, MSN, or Yahoo. Instead, they're focusing on how to make search work better and how to work better with search.

One innovator, Kanisa Inc., helps companies' customers find useful information within corporate databases. Kanisa actually predates Google by a year, and its original search software product is still used by customers, including some 25,000 Microsoft service agents. The company has been rejuvenated in part by last year's acquisition of search technology from Ask Jeeves. Today, customers including Ford, Nike, ADP, and Nestle Purina PetCare incorporate Kanisa's technology into their Websites.

Purina, the pet food and supplies company's U.S. operation, powers its "Ask Purina" feature with Kanisa's natural-language query and search technology on all its customer-facing sites. It also offers the tool on the Pets.Yahoo.com site through a partnership with Yahoo. Visitors can type in full questions--such as "What's the best food for a two-month-old kitten?"--and the results will comprise a series of relevant links and summaries. While that's great for customers, the real benefit from Purina's perspective is that such self-service search tools reduce phone traffic to its call center. "If you look at the number of queries you get times the cost to handle a phone call, the ROI is huge," says Brad Worth, a brand manager in Purina's interactive group.