Business Week On Desktop Search Economics 106
prostoalex writes "Business Week responds to the recent announcement by Yahoo! to join the ever-competitive desktop search field and asks whether any money will be made in giving away free utilities for desktop search. Apparently, beyond the intangible benefit of brand loyalty (which on the Internet probably doesn't amount to a whole lot), the only way to make money off the desktop search engines, as Business Week sees it, is to show related ads, which is bound to bring up some privacy issues."
Not regular brand loyalty (Score:5, Insightful)
Once again, money money money (Score:3, Insightful)
Brand loyalty (in my segment) will default to 'benevolent' google.
Cash isn't king to everyone, but programmers do have to eat (And corporations do have to make a profit else they get hammered off the street).
Ads = No desktop search (Score:3, Insightful)
Ads related to my web searches? Ok. Ads based on what files are on my PC? No thanks, too big of a privacy concern for me.......
It's not a question of money. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not a question of money, but of presence. Once you have everyone using your software, you can look at sneaking in profit centers.
Google's a great example. They didn't start with AdSense - they added it once they were king.
Once your app is everywhere, you have all sorts of options. For example, if you don't want to sell ads, write another (commercial) program which expands the functionality of the original.
It's not always about the quick buck. Sometimes, it's about putting yourself in the proper position.
Um... (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe they need to teach people how to use a computer... because I can't see this catering to anyone but the "I can't find my files even though Windows XP Retard Edition saves it to My\ Documents by default" crowd.
Can't someone just port grep -r to win32, maybe put a fancy GUI around it? Or is it suddenly innovation to reinvent simple tools unix already invented 30 years ago?
Re:Personal Search Tool (Score:2, Insightful)
short-term thinking (Score:3, Insightful)
When used in this context, "intangible" doesn't mean "non-existent"... it means "hard to quantify". The difficulty of quantifying the benefit of a proposal should is not per se an argument against enacting the proposal.
For example, almost any investment in infrastructure has "intangible" benefits. When a government considers whether to build new roads to stimulate economic development of an area, it is very hard to pin down precisely what benefits will be derived in terms of commerce, consumption, quality of life, opportunity cost, etc... yet these kinds of decisions are made all the time, and for good reason: a persistent lack of infrastructural investment correlates strongly with diminished outcomes over the long term.
Not sure if Google is trying to make money... (Score:3, Insightful)
Basically, a pre-emptive strike to keep from loosing customers to Microsoft OS integration.
Let's use "grep -r" to search the internet! (Score:3, Insightful)
Will grep find an instance of a word in a pdf document buried in gigabytes of data? What about a plain text document, who will find it faster, grep or GDS?
You do know these things are indexing your docs right?
Maybe you should invent a dumb search engine that gets rid of all that wasteful indexing nonsense does the following:
NoMoreNicksLeft's search engine (v 1.0)
1) Enter text you want to search
2) Enter "top" URL to start search from
3) Crawl whole internet looking for that string for as many links as can be reached from that "top" document.
Version 2.0 would replace steps 2 and 3 with
2) Randomly select a "top" URL, and visit every registered domain on the internet.
Does that make sense to you, because that's what you're suggesting.
Re: Not regular brand loyalty (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Not sure if Google is trying to make money... (Score:2, Insightful)
Assuming, of course, that microsoft would have even thought of implementing a good desktop search system if Google had not it first.
MS has had a crude one for years, I remember my Win98 machine periodically going into a flury of disk activity, and consquently killing interactive response time, every couple of hours just to rebuild (from scratch) the full keyword index of MS word and other "Text" documents.
It took me almost a month to figure out that my machine wasn't broken, that MS intended that slowness and disk fight to happen regularly and that I could actually turn it off, if I knew where to look.
But from then until Google did their thing, MS certainly had not improved on their system and most people had learned to avoid installing it in the first place.
Re:Um... (Score:3, Insightful)
The other thing I use GDS for is chat logs: if I remember reading someone say something, I can look for it much faster with GDS than with my megabytes of saved conversations. And if AIM crashes for whatever reason. GDS has been silently copying the conversation, so that I can get back to the history quickly.
Grep -r is slow; it's an on-demand search, not an indexing service. It's innovation to do things the right way instead of pulling out 30-year-old tools and asking them to use the same paradigms on today's volumes of data.
Re:Not regular brand loyalty (Score:3, Insightful)
Its the "let's make the hard drive as easy to navigate as the web by using the same tools" that now leads to "let's make the hard drive as easy to search as the web using the same tools".
Both approaches fail in that they don't seem to understand doing these things for your hard drive should be easier than doing it on the web.
At least Apple seems to "get it" even if they don't always get it right (from Sherlock to Spotlight).
Yet another "must have" nobody cares about. (Score:3, Insightful)
Ok, Mac guys. How many, show of hands, don't be shy... How many of you don't use Finder to find things? Nobody. Ok...
Windows guys! Ok, I KNOW you'll be interested. Show of hands, who here doesn't use or know about "find files"? Nobody? Come on, SOMEONE in here must need a new search tool. Anybody? Come on, you're killing me here.
Ok, tough audience. I can roll with that.
Alright, let's pretend for a minute that you DIDN'T have a directory/file search tool installed on your computer. That's DID NOT. OK? Now, show of hands. Who here is willing to install my new tool FindYourCrap, for the low low low price of 29.95, with the understanding that I'll have a few ads running from time to time and you have no expectation of privacy, etc, etc, it's all in the EULA.
What? Nobody? Come ON people! I gave you bagels. Doesn't ANYBODY want some of this?
Fine. FINE! You people are pains in the... Ok, look, I'll tell you what, I've got a line on these condos in Florida...