Sex, Drugs, Strawberries, and a New Bubble

You might have read about Cuil, the supposed Google killer which indexes three times as much content as Google does. Too bad it never surfaces anything relevant for me. And have you noticed that the “Search 121,617,892,992 web pages” hasn’t changed in days? Ok, you might guess, they’re not really going to kill Google. Instead I think we’re really re-living some sort of strange bubble at the moment.

First of all, check this out to get an insight into the inner workings of Cuil as a company. That sounds very 1999.

Secondly, working for the largest interactive agency in the world™, I’ve seen a lot of requests for proposals from a lot of companies that all want to build video search portals. That seems to be the next big thing. There are a few cool players out there, Truveo is one of them. Select sites are trying to index the videos by scene detection and voice recognition software in addition to standard metadata.

A lot of players want to build similar portals all of a sudden. Unfortunately there aren’t any really viable off-the-shelf search engine technologies you can buy to do this right. If I look at FAST Search, which is still one of my favorite engines and happens to be owned by Microsoft, they have a multimedia search add-on I want to evaluate soon (yet I’m told not to get my hopes up). I think sophisticated video search portals will be limited to a very few capable players that can invest in the technology themselves and have the proper funding for the R&D and necessary server farm required to parse through all video on the web.

And just to round off the argument, I am surprised at how many of these projects don’t have clear business models (Cuil included). It might be cool, but what’s the point if it doesn’t make money? Just because Google can throw money at 15 technologies to get one out of it that works doesn’t you should.

Anyhow, I think we’re in the middle of a (video) search bubble and it’ll be very interesting to see which players emerge from it as leaders!

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