Legal Research

Pop Quiz: Which Horse Came in Second on Saturday in the Preakness?

Mine That Bird.

Very good. And third? Do you need to take a few minutes to Google it? (I did.)

Musket Man.

Unless you bet your house on them, you don’t care about second and third, do you? Nah. Same is true with search engines. Nobody’s talking about Yahoo and Microsoft right now — we’re focused on Twitter’s “Discovery Engine” and Wolfram | Alpha, the “computational knowledge engine“. (Engines … Maybe I should have used a car racing analogy instead. Oh well, too late to change horses now.)

Anyway, Microsoft and Yahoo are now trying to get our attention. There’s talk that Microsoft will launch its new and improved search engine next week. Microsoft, nosogood at branding, has toyed with calling the new service Kumo. Danny Sullivan thinks the service might actually be called Bing. Bing?

Yahoo, dropping like a stone, said Tuesday that they’re gonna get smarter. They recognize that people want a quick answer, not a list of 10 blue links. Are they ready with a new Yahoo? No.

Will any of this ultimately matter? No. The search biz has passed Microsoft and Yahoo by.  Lemmee tell you a story. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt spoke at Monday’s graduation ceremonies at Penn. Provost Vincent Price joked about how he collected background info on Schmidt for his introduction:

“I went to the Internet and I Yahooed him. [laughter] When the name of your company becomes a verb, and the substitution of a competitor sounds ridiculous, that is market penetration.”

When the leader of a major university tells 5,000 graduating students that you’re “ridiculous”, you need to find another line of business.

Full post as published by Jenkins Webblits on May 20, 2009 (boomark / email).