Is Google Mortal?
7/28/08
Since Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed the algorithm for Google in the late 1990s, things have been going smoothly. (In fact they tried selling their search engine algorithm to Yahoo!, who already had what was considered the best search engine at the time. Yahoo! declined the offer). Google has the highest market capitalization of any American company not in the Dow Industrials according to their Wikipedia site. They have the largest search engine, a rumored competitor to iPhone in the works (the Google Phone), a successful social networking site in India and Brazil (Orkut), blogging and wiki platforms, and a wildly successful (if not wildly turbulent) stock price. But…
An article on CNN.com today discussed Anna Patterson, a former Google employee who apparently came up with last search engine which Google bought in 2004. Ms. Patterson quit Google in 2006 to make an even more powerful search engine, and is now armed with $33 million in venture capital money to push her search engine called Cuil (pronounced “cool”). She is confident her algorithm is superior because it searched through three times the web pages (120 billion versus Google’s 40 billion), will have an even more user-friendly format, and will not store user search histories or search patterns as Google does currently.
Ms. Patterson felt that Google was becoming stagnant and happy with their position as a market leader. She feels that her product is far superior, even if Google has become a cliche for web surfing (or web research). Is she a traitor? Or an innovator?
-Amit
akooner@brilliont.com
Tags: Anna Patterson, CNN, Google, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Wikipedia, Yahoo!
