At the age of 25, a given technology is actually outdated, says Gianpiero Lotito. You would only buy a television of that age as a “vintage experience”. “But search engines are just as old.” The co-founder of FacilityLive, Italy’s most valuable start-up, wantsto say: It’s time for innovations.
Search engines better than Google ? Many have tried to build an alternative to Google or to reinvent Internet search. The list of failures is almost as long. But now a number of entrepreneurs are trying again. Including former Google employees and scientists. They have been boosted by regulators, privacy debates and technological advances. The chance of challenging the apparently overpowering opponent Google has never seemed greater.
Like Lotito, they also hope for the “innovator’s dilemma”: an initially revolutionary product can only be improved minimally over time. And while the market leader must focus on distribution, new competitors can drive their developments.
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The hope is also nourished by competition watchdogs worldwide who want to break up Google’s monopoly power . The famous WhatsApp case also showed that many Internet users do rely on data protection when given the choice. The data tracking is also the biggest criticism of the Google model.
Google’s market power is still huge, However. In 2020, more than 93 percent of all internet searches in Europe were “googled” . The largest search engine from Europe is Ecosia, which, according to founder Christian Kroll, has a market share of just over one percent in Germany, France and Great Britain.
That seems infinitesimally small. But Dirk Lewandowski, who researches and teaches search engines, refers to the “gigantic number” of search queries. “If you place a suitable advertisement for every search query, you can definitely make money even with a minimal market share.” Google made 32 billion dollars in sales with its search engine business in the fourth quarter of 2020 alone.
It is also important that there are different ways to open up a part of the huge market. Most search engine providers combine different approaches.
The index
In the background, an Internet search engine works like a table of content. Providers must scan and tag billions of websites to show where the information they are looking for can be found. If you really want to compete with Google, you have to build up an equally large index for websites and keep it up to date. That seems almost impossible.
The Google index is said to contain an estimated 500 to 600 billion pages, while its biggest competitor, Microsoft ‘s Bing , has 100 to 200 billion pages. In addition to these US giants and the Russian Yandex , there are hardly any search engines with their own indices. An exception is Mojeek, which was founded in 2004 as a private project by Marc Smith at the University of Sussex, England.
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In recent years, the small company has raised almost 2.7 million euros in venture capital from private investors and promises not to collect any user data. In April 2020, Mojeek announced that it had now indexed three billion pages . However, the majority owner Burda stopped the funding in 2020. The hurdles were too big.
Because the Internet cannot be easily scanned, search engines need access permissions to the pages they want to index. But because that puts a strain on the websites, they only let in search engines, which in turn bring them a lot of visitors – that’s Google and maybe Bing.
It is a doom-loop. If you don’t increase your index, you won’t gain users. If you don’t gain users, you can’t grow your index. But there are rumors that a new, promising candidate wants to build a search engine with its own index: Apple . The iPhone maker has enough users, capital and is looking for search engine engineers.
The business model
Without their own indices, but with a new business model, two former Google employees want to stir up the market. Before founding Neeva two years ago, Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan were responsible for Google and YouTube advertising systems.
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They of all people now want to provide an offer without advertising and for a fee. According to Ramaswamy, ad funding requires trade-offs — more ads, and therefore worse results. That’s what the Google founders once said.
After a test phase, Neeva should cost less than ten dollars a month. General content comes from Microsoft’s Bing, maps from Apple , stock data from Intrinio and weather info from weather.com. Users should also be able to connect personal data storage devices such as e-mail accounts, Microsoft Office or Dropbox. Well-known US investors have already invested 37.5 million dollars with Sequoia and Greylock Partners.
The specialization
Richard Socher, a well-known former Salesforce manager, also wants to stir up the search engine market. Under the name You.com, the artificial intelligence expert wants to build a “trustworthy search engine” that “summarizes the Internet”.
His search engine will initially specialize in complex purchase decisions, in which users typically open several windows at the same time in order to compare offers. Not much is known yet. But the sponsors are also well-known: Salesforce founder Marc Benioff and Jim Breyer, an early Facebook investor.
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Gianpiero Lotito and co-founder Mariuccia Teroni of FacilityLive have also focused on complex search queries. On today’s web, you have to “gather information yourself and keep changing pages,” says Lotito. 15 new themed platforms are set to change this year, including one for museums and one for travel planning.
They are intended to aggregate technological information without forwarding users to other sites. FacilityLive raised more than 52 million dollars during the pandemic and achieved a valuation of more than 225 million dollars. It is considered the most valuable start-up in Italy.
The target group
The Berlin company Ecosia is known as a “search engine that plants trees”. It obtains search results from Microsoft’s Bing via a license model and also receives a large part of the advertising revenue generated by its users. In January, Ecosia recorded revenues of more than 2.5 million euros in this way. The social enterprise invests 80 percent of the surplus income in reforestation projects and regenerative energies. The deal is worth it for Microsoft because most Ecosia users would otherwise probably use Google.
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The US search engine DuckDuckGo also works with a license model via Microsoft. It is aimed at very privacy-conscious users. The fact that Google, Bing and others deliver such good search results is not only due to the large indices, but above all to to precise analysis of user behavior. The collected user data can be used to anticipate what someone might be looking for. Because DuckDuckGo doesn’t do that, users often have to click through more hits to get the desired result.
The technology
Leif-Nissen Lundbæk believes that privacy and accurate search results can go hand in hand. With two co-founders, the mathematician founded Xayn at Imperial College in London in 2018: The search engine relies on decentralized learning in artificial intelligence. Xayn also uses different indices.
The app, which was previously only usable on smartphones, analyzes the behavior of users on their devices and does not export any personal data. “Instead of bringing the data to the algorithm, we bring the algorithm to the data,” explains CEO Lundbæk.
Individual models would be trained on mobile phones, after which the search behavior itself could be used as a model to improve other people’s search results. “We believe that privacy will only become mainstream if it offers the same user experience as non-privacy-driven applications,” he says.
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