Google dominates worldwide, but there are some places where it is losing. Russia’s Yandex, China’s Baidu, and South Korea’s Naver are all leading Google in their home countries, largely due to those search engines having organically grown in their home countries.

Another such search engine is Seznam in the Czech Republic. Seznam holds 62% of the search engine share in country while Google has 29%.

However, word is circulating that Seznam is looking to sell for a price of around $1 billion, and there are rumors that Google is looking to acquire it. That would give Google control of the top 91% of search in the Czech Republic. Game, set, match.

Why would a search engine that is already beating Google want to sell out to them? I suppose it’s like getting up a the roulette table, betting 00, hitting it, and then cashing out to go the Mustang Ranch. Stick around too long and the house will get it all back, and in the world of search, Google is the house.

But it appears if someone is going to start a new search engine, they would be best served to make it localized or specialized in some way. Jimmy Wales’ Wikia Search could be classified as a niche search engine, but Cuil appeared to take Google on directly. Neither is having much success as of yet, and have often appeared rather ridiculous in the face of the giant.

Is it possible for any startup to concoct an algorithm that can beat Google? And even if they did, would they stick it out through the tough times and ignore the big offers from Google or Microsoft? Perhaps there is an entrepreneur out there willing to stick to his or her guns and because they know they have a better product. But millions or billions in buyout offers are tough to turn down.

It appears that if there is money to be made in new search engines at this point, it’s creating special technologies (like Powerset), perfecting localized search engines (like Seznam), producing effective ad networks (like Rambler) and hoping Google or Microsoft buys you out.

But what if Google’s only competition (at least in the US) is Live Search and faltering Yahoo? Is it even possible, with Google’s domination in so many other web properties (Google Maps, Google Earth, Gmail, Google docs) that even if a great algorithm was concocted that people are too entrenched in Google to care enough to do search anywhere else?

Open source, like Wikia search, may be the only hope. But taking a look at Linux, whose main source of mainstream growth these days is in low-powered netbooks, the firepower from open source search may not be there to match up with the top, dominant, proprietary technologies.

Thanks a lot to Don Reisinger at Mashable for info and inspiration for this post.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 1:34 pmand is filed under Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.