Newsweek investigates the search for the best search engine and examines if Google may be vulnerable:
Despite spending billions trying to diversify beyond the straightforward search offered on its stripped-down, almost childlike home page, Google reaps about 60 percent of its outsize revenues and more than 80 percent of its profits from ads on that page, according to analysts' estimates. That means the company's success continues to hinge on the dominance of its simple search. There are no guarantees that its dominance will last. It is threatened by a massive worldwide effort to build a better search, involving giant high-tech rivals, governments in Europe and Asia, and hundreds of tiny start-ups founded by academic wunderkinders much like Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the Stanford graduate students who founded Google in 1998. And it's also dependent on an online public that may make up the most fickle market in history, an audience whose interests are already showing signs of wandering outside the search box.
Google may well be able to continue its charmed life by holding onto its search lead and getting its non-search businesses to kick in more profit, and Wall Street is certainly betting that way. But the computer world has a way of bringing seemingly golden brands down to earth with surprising speed, as Lotus, Novell, AOL and other firms have discovered. It's not farfetched that five years from now we may wonder why everyone thought Google was such a big deal. "Google has won the first stages of the Web-searching race," says Trip Chowdhry, an analyst with Global Equities Research in San Francisco. "It won't win the next one."
History shows how quickly search leaders can lose their way.
Read the rest of this feature report here.
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