ON SENDING YAHOO!/GOOGLE AN SOS ON BLOGSEARCH

SOS:  SAVE OUR SEARCH

There's a little kerfuffle in the blog-world about whether and/or when Yahoo! and Google should jump in with both feet in the nascent, chaotic, and red-hot growing market for blog search. 

It got kicked off by web-lord Jason Calcanis' post titled "Google and Yahoo! Blog Search Petition", on the assumption that the incumbents like Technorati  have reportedly been having a hard time keeping up with the growth in blogs and blog posts.  (Jason subsequently put up a follow-up post to the original).

It then got commented by a range of bloggerati including VC Fred Wilson, Businessweek's Stephen Baker, Searchblog, Micro Persuasion's Steve Rubel, Randy Holloway, Backweave,and a number of others I probably haven't noticed yet, along with a commendably candid response (see comment #8 under Jason's original post) by Technorati founder/CEO David Sifry.

I have two reactions to this hubbub, one based on times past and one on times ahead:

1.  How much the world has changed.  In what seems like a life-time ago, another industry giant was ravenously entering/acquiring every innovative and successful market in its industry on the justification that it was a natural part of the operating system and/or core applications for the office, and they would have added those features anyway. 

Today, we are begging for the incumbent giants to pay attention to an emerging area and come to the rescue.

I guess its a testament to the trust that "the market" puts on Yahoo! and Google, on the assumption that they are not the "evil" empire, that makes this ironic state of affairs possible.

2.  Implicit in this SOS is the assumption that scale matters...that the infrastructure required to provide real-time search of content that is showing exponential growth requires infrastructure scaling skills AND resources that younger start-ups cannot possibly match, at least not in time to deflect some of the opportunity cost borne by blog content platforms in terms of lost advertising and readership. 

Additionally implicit is the assumption that only Yahoo! and Google have the wherewith all to manage that scale in the time required.  Both companies, and particularly Google, has spoiled millions of users around the world in expecting "instant" gratification to every little question that enters their minds. 

Even though we may not understand and appreciate the immense infrastructure assets that go behind making that a reality, we expect it of every future type of search service, never-mind that it's on real-time changing content, and not static web-pages.

The only other web company with a real-time content driver to its business, that had a similar disconnect between infrastructure scaling issues and rampant customer demand and expectations, was eBay in the 1998-2001 period.

As a minor aside, I also find it interesting that only Yahoo! and Google were chosen for the SOS, and not Microsoft and AOL (remember them?).  Particularly Microsoft given their considerable huffing and puffing in recent months preparing to blow Google's search house down.

It's an open question whether companies who have attained mastery over the domain of searching static web pages via crawling and indexing can simply add the functionality of searching blogs, which is a rather banal word for the world of rich, real-time, constantly flowing, and immediate content that is coming at us like a Tsunami. 

And that's not even mentioning the emerging markets for:

1. tagging services a la the delicious, and furls of the new web world...
2. and blog readers and aggregators like Bloglines and Newsgator. 
3. and blogging software infrastructure and hosting providers like Six Apart/Typepad.

I've put in my two cents on these areas in previous posts.

To the subject at hand though, that Yahoo! and Google will enter this market is likely a foregone conclusion.  Indeed, Yahoo! recently yanked a beta page featuring blog search, shown here as a screen-grab by Steve Rubel.   

In this observer's view, even though incumbents can often add the functionality, the hearts, minds and eventually economics often go to the new-comer who is solely focused on the problem at hand. 

Technorati is one of several contenders in this market, and is indeed having problems scaling, but one has to but look at the passion in just one of Sifry's posts on the challenges and opportunities in the blog search market, to see that there's a will to overcome and win all the marbles.  That's what makes it a horse-race despite all the flares in the sky.