It's been three months since TechCrunch Disrupt in New York City, an eternity in Web 2.0 and start-up time, but I'm still pondering my major takehome assessment from this fascinating event: that mobile phones, and various aps to search for aps themselves or various content like restaurant reviews, all pose a serious challenge to Google search -- well, to Google the Ad Agency.
It seemed so obvious to me what was happening -- just like Facebook was outside of the Google ambit and enabled people to search for things -- people, places, brands, events -- so the mobile phone and ap world have been largely outside Google -- which is still back on the Internet, and not in smart phones.
Oh, to be sure there is Android, and the Android apps, but everyone knows Apple's app store has gadzillion more apps and Apple is more innovative and that there is a world exploding of apps and social services that are not captured by Google's search.
While at TechCrunch Disrupt, I observed several interesting phenomena -- there were a number of start-ups that involved using apps to search -- for example Do@ which has the motto "reinventing mobile search...search like a search engine, and answer like an app."
Another one was called Quixey -- "a functional search engine for apps that lets you find apps by describing what you want to do."
And there were a few others.
So I went up to them at the expo and asked the devs if they feared whether Google was going to kill them -- or perhaps buy them out, alternatively. They joked that they were talking to Google acquisitions already!
But not really -- and they didn't even really seem to see it as I did. Perhaps because I'm not a tekkie I could see this simple thing more clearly (or perhaps I was hopelessly misled, you tell me): there is a whole world of app search out there that has Google beat, and Google may not even realize this (of course, that's silly to even conceive of, right? Because Google is ominiscient, no?)
Of course, an app search comes up with...other apps. It's not stuff itself...exactly. And yet it rapidly does become a search of stuff -- you get the app to find things and instantly you get them -- whatever the interest, and I tried searching for "virtual worlds" and got Blue Mars' app, and so on.
Even so, try them and see what fascinating stuff you do turn up -- and then if you get "the app for that" what troves of information you'd get -- bypassing Google.
I asked some of these companies a lot of questions trying to see if they were really standing alone from the Google Borg. Did they in fact use the Google Search Appliance? Were they in fact not hooked up to Google at the end of the day, or were the apps?
They wouldn't always tell me, but it became clear that companies had servers, they had the data of their customers so valuable to marketers on those servers, running those apps, and *Google did not have that information.* Of course, this is the stuff of wars -- the Yelp reviews, for example.
What you find out when you're on a phone, especially when the service isn't that great (and that inevitably happens) -- you don't go on Google as in "www.google.com" You go to Yelp to find something or FourSquare. You use one of these services displayed at TechCrunch like Rexly to find movies or music that relates also to your social graph.
I can see this with the shift in my teenagers. Before -- was it only a year ago? -- they used to talk about how they would "go on the Internet" to find something out -- a fact to use in homework, a figure to resolve some argument, information about the weather or a store with a sale or whatever. "Going on the Internet" mean going to a box on a desk or a laptop sometimes carried around -- but it was "up there" or "in that box over there" -- and while it involved friends sometimes -- a call out on Meebo or Facebook -- it more often related to a solitary search inside google.com or ask.com.
Now, going through the same motions, the kids say "I don't know, but I can find out on my phone." Or, "I have to look that up on my phone." By that, they mean they will use something like Yelp or maybe just AIM -- they aren't going to go on Google from a phone. Maybe Google has to make a little mini search app for mobile in order to catch up with the way more and more people are leaving the Internet and going on their phones -- and that aggregate web of apps and connections where they are located now "in the cloud" or whatever isn't...the same thing as that old Internet where Google used to dominate everything.
And they must know this -- hence one of the reasons for the Motorola acquisition.
So at TechCrunch Disrupt back in May, I decided to go right up to Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Location and Local Service for Google, and ask her if she felt that these new app search start-ups were a threat to Google. Why not? It's the whole point of going to these tech conferences, trying to get some spontaneous answer from these news-makers who are usually so processed.
I had earlier tried asking this question of several Google employees standing around here and there in the food lines and such, and they had no clue -- they simply didn't even want to engage on the topic -- it wasn't their department, I should ask the PR person, whatever.
I introduced myself to Marissa Mayer and just asked her point blank: "Do you think these new search apps are a threat to Google's domination of search?"
She looked at me like I was from Mars.
Ms. Mayer is one of these very well-coiffed and expertly dressed blonde women in high-tech management positions who did not get there by being warm and cuddly with the male social misfits and jerks who make up the overwhelming majority of management and employees at a company like Google.
I could tell she was hoping I'd go away. I persisted. If you're going to get something of value out of these conventions, you have to try.
"Have you seen the start-up companies here like Do@ and Quixley and Rexly? Everyone's more and more living their life on their phones and they don't go on the web to search with Google," I said.
She said she hadn't seen all of them but that she wasn't that impressed -- the search is for aps themselves, not other content -- you don't get as much content as you would in a Google search.
"But all of this is happening outside of Google," I said. "I look up a restaurant on Yelp, not Google."
She stopped and pondered. She looked thoughtfully into the distance.
"Someone will do this well," she concluded -- in that sort of hard-nosed, haughty tone that you would expect a VP of Google to use -- and the implication was that nobody was doing it very well *yet* -- but that Google -- or something that Google would buy -- *would* do it well.
I kept asking about the apps on display at TCD -- she said she "had to go meet somebody".
I don't have enough technical knowledge to know if those apps represented at TechCrunch Disrupt were in fact already doing this better than she would admit -- or what the challenges are. Obviously, they may be simplistic or limited in what they do turn up if they don't have sophisticated algorithms.
In the Google versus Yelp wars, you feel like Yelp is going to lose -- and that Google fanboyz are rooting for it to lose and stop whining.
Of course, when you download Yelp to use on your Android, then Google does get the data. And when you see how it gets it everywhere -- look at how the Google camel got its nose under the tent in Facebook for a time -- it used to own much of the bottom half of your page on searches. It used to be your search within Facebook's search box only turned up stuff within the realm of Facebook. Then for a time, on the lower half of the page you would see Google search results that take you out of that realm.
Today, you see Facebook content, the sponsored search items (ads tailored to your keyword) and then on that bottom panel -- Bing results. I guess the friction between Google and Facebook caused FB to dump Google for that spot? It's just as well. I want somewhere to go where I can get away from Google.
As an amateur tech observer, my insight about app searches threatening Google was something I came across on my own by watching what happened at TechCrunch Disrupt.
It occurred to me to test whether anyone else had thought about this just now, so I did a search and found this by Clint Boulton on eweek.com last year:
Applications that take users directly to e-commerce sites and other Web service destinations threaten search providers such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Bing, according to BroadPoint AmTech. Some vendors are making it even easier for consumers to visit their site and make purchases. For example, Amazon, eBay and Best Buy have mobile apps that enable full browsing and purchasing functionality. Consumers who download these mobile apps right to their smartphone deck can go straight to the source Website and buy what they need. Why should people use the search box?
Exactly!
BroadPoint AmTech said 10 percent to 30 percent of the mobile searches consumers trigger for Amazon.com, eBay and the like go through the Google, Yahoo or Bing search box on their iPhones, Google Android devices and other smartphones. Ads served with these navigational queries cultivate decent click-through rates.
But many vendors are making it even easier for consumers to visit their sites and make purchases...Consumers who download these mobile apps right to their smartphone deck can go straight to the source Website and buy what they need without opening a browser, entering queries in a search box, said BroadPoint AmTech analyst Ben Schachter.
This was said back in January 2010 -- why didn't it continue to become more of a problem for Google, given that searches with apps have probably only skyrocketed since then with the huge surge in i-phones and app startups?
As always happens in the tech blogosphere, there was a squall of blogs back in January 2010 all speculating about this subject (some merely reprinting the same basic press release) -- yet it didn't become such a big story as to get into the New York Times.
To be sure, the Times had a story after TCD on Do@ is speeding up the mobile search -- and taking you to sites already fixed up to make it easier for mobiles to view them. In fact increasingly, when I get links in email or Facebook I click even sitting at my desktop, and what I get is a page meant to be viewed from a mobile.
Maybe it is a problem for Google, but not one they can't fix by rolling out Nexus One and now buying Motorola so they dominate handsets with their own and probably there are other things we don't know about.
Of course, we're also told that apps are dead, too.
But my own hunch, based on what I saw at TechCrunch Disrupt and this little encounter with Marissa Mayer, that when she says "Someone will do this well..." she doesn't mean waiting around and admiring some other company doing this from afar, she means...something Google will own.
With the Motorola acquisition, Google now has a lock on travel apps, for example:
With a native travel application already on Blackberry, one coming soon no doubt to iPhones and iPads and, now, Google having the ability to ship travel search as a native app on all Motorola devices, the travel search ecosystem will change yet again.
Whatever the real story, one thing is certain, all this fuss kicked up about patent trolls and the need to dismantle the patent system, with incendiary articles appearing right on time as if on cue like Sarah Lacey's, now really look stupid -- after Google has made a major move and a market mover all related to buying...patents!
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