Technology Review – which is an MIT Enterprise publication – posted a very interesting article today, Google And The Coming Search Wars, Revisited.
The author, Charles H. Ferguson, revisits his article about the future of Google that was featured in the January 2005 issue of Technology Review. Here are the first three paragraphs from his online piece:
“In that article, I argued that the search market will become enormously larger and more diverse than presently, encompassing many forms of personal, internal corporate, for-sale proprietary, and public data stored in a wide variety of systems, ranging from PCs to iPods to corporate servers.
Then I asserted that Google’s leadership position remains fragile, given the absence of barriers to switching and an impending challenge from Microsoft. In particular, the emerging requirement for search interoperability across many data formats and systems, and the diversity of search-related innovation, imply that search engines must become standardized platforms with open interfaces.
I concluded that unless Google created such a platform and made it generally accessible by providing Application Program Interfaces (APIs) to its search engine, it would both lose much of its potential market and render itself vulnerable to a Microsoft attack.”
I would strongly suggest you pick up the rest here.