The Internet is swiftly becoming the primary repository of the bulk of human inf

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Search And Destroy

 

A gang of Web-search companies is gunning for Google. The stakes

have never been higher

By LEV GROSSMAN

 

Monday, Dec. 15, 2003

 

The first director of the great library of Alexandria was a very

smart man, and we all owe him a big debt of gratitude. When he

showed up for work on his first day — that was around 300 B.C.

— he realized he had 500,000 papyrus scrolls and no way to

organize them. He had stumbled on an important truth: You can have

more information at your fingertips than any other human being in

history, but it won't do you much good if you can't find the piece

you want. He solved the problem by ordering the scrolls

alphabetically, a principle that survives to this day. Too bad his

name was Zenodotus.

 

Today we're all Zenodotuses. Each of us has access to more data than

anybody has ever had before, but still the trick is to find what we

want when we want it. Given the size of the Internet — estimates

run around 500 billion documents and counting — that's no easy

task. Internet surfers do about 550 million Web searches a day.

Amass that many people anywhere doing anything and somebody is going

to try to sell them something. The market for advertising to those

Web searchers is worth about $2 billion, and it's growing at a rate

of 35% a year — far outpacing any other advertising medium.

What's more, Google, the reigning sultan of search, is looking

vulnerable. The combination of big money and big opportunity has

attracted some mighty big players, including Microsoft, and

Amazon. There's a street fight brewing over Internet search that

will make the browser wars look like thumb wrestling.

 

But for a minute forget about the big numbers, the millions of

customers and the billions of dollars. Think about what's at stake

culturally and socially in the search wars, and all those zeros

start looking pretty paltry by comparison. The Internet is swiftly

becoming the primary repository of the bulk of human information.

 

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101031222-

561499,00.html