August 11, 2005
Search Goes Big Time
Do you know how you can tell that Search is really big business these days?
Forget about looking at profit and loss statements. Forget about looking at most everything in fact. The way to tell is when the major search engines start suing each other and making moves that are obviously designed to head each other off in some market or the other.
Within the last couple of weeks we've had Yahoo! jumping into the "Adsense" market.
More recently China's supposedly largest search engine (supposedly because I can't find any independent data) Baidu opened on the NYSE with a big splash. It ran up over 350% on its first day of trading. It's apparently known as "Google of China" and in fact Google holds a minority stake in Baidu. Then days later comes the announcement that Yahoo! has purchased a 40% of the 2nd largest Chinese search property Alibaba, hot on the heels of the Google/Baidu announcement.
The kicker is that Microsoft and Google are in quite a tussle (read: Lawsuit) over Google's hiring of Kai-Fu Lee to head up it's China R&D operations. Lee was under contract to MS and had a non-compete clause. Apparently things are going to get nasty since Microsoft found documents on one of former computers on the MS campus where he was corresponding with Google.
It's all very messy from what I can tell. And going to get messier.
When you get three behemoths, with basically unlimited funding, locking horns somebody is going to get hurt. Badly.
But it's a clear sign that Search is now a very big business.