Remember when Marissa Mayer axed telecommuting at Yahoo because, among other things, they found they had people on the payroll that no longer did any actual work there? Well, apparently they also noticed that Altavista was still on their payroll, and earlier this month they 1=33009″>axed it, too. Back in 1995, Altavista showed promise but then was quickly eclipsed by Google, which was incorporated three years later. Fuck it, I’m going back to JumpStation.
In other search engine news that somebody might care about, Washington Post has this interview with Gabe Weinberg, who heads up DuckDuckGo, a fledgeling search engine that promises not to track its users:
We don’t track our users. We don’t have to do that because we focus on Web search, where we can make money without tracking people. All the rest have other products that require tracking.
I tried out DuckDuckGo, and the UI isn’t bad. Results were roughly the same as I get on Google (albeit rearranged a bit), but there’s way less clutter. I may just give DuckDuckGo a trial. Either way, it’s an interesting read if you’re a nerd. This nerd learned an example of white label: “Ask and AOL are still around with 1 percent or 2 percent of the market. They are both white label of Google [e.g. Google’s search results re-packaged].” And one of the main (specific) reasons no one can mess with Google in the search engine market. From Weinberg:
If you look at the search engines that died, especially the ones that raised a bunch of money in the mid-2000s, almost all of them tried to copy the indexing Google does. They tried to copy the whole Internet to their servers and then data mine it. That is a very expensive proposition both in human capital and physical capital. That is a large barrier to entry that only Microsoft, Yandex and Baidu have been able to do. All of those are public companies and they all spend a lot of money per year on it. Way more than any startup has ever raised.
