I just ran across this article from Time titled “What Will the World Do with More Search Engines?“  My first reaction and answer to this question was “it will ignore them,” and for actual search engines, I think that is true.  User habits have already been ingrained, and chiseling away at market share is no small task, as Yahoo! and MSN can attest.

However, CNN (and now Time) have recently run articles regarding new “search engines” that have come to market, no doubt influenced by the recent public launch of highly-publicized (and frankly somewhat disappointing in scope) Wolfram Alpha, which isn’t so much a search engine as much as it is a computational engine.

The Time article isn’t so much about what the world is going to do with more search engines, as much as it identifies how search has become an innovator’s dilemma.  Much in the way Clayton Christensen explained in his seminal book “The Innovator’s Dilemma” how the semiconductor chip industry saw improvements in technology that surpassed the needs of the existing market, the Time article exhibits how the capabilities of search engines have begun to exceed the needs of the existing search market.

Search engines continue to add features, whether it is Google, Yahoo, MSN, or otherwise.  However, for most queries, a user can find the answer they are looking for from any of the major engines.  No single engine holds a meaningful and distinctive feature that places it head and shoulders above it’s competitors when it comes to organic search.  As Time puts it:

“The trouble with the search-engine business is that its future may have almost nothing to do with whether search results get more accurate. Google’s information is already more than adequate for the huge majority of people who want to find information online. At some point, and that point has probably been reached, people cannot tell the difference between flying in an airplane that is at 32,000 feet and one that is flying 1,000 feet higher. The change in perspective means nothing to them. All they know is that they are as high as they have to be to get where they are going.”

In a classic innovator’s dilemma, this would mean that search technology should be able to serve other markets.  I think in many ways, this has already started to manifest.  Google created Gmail to increase the real estate in which it could deliver targeted advertising, but through it’s search technology brought a superior cloud email system to market.  And it is probably no coincidence that Apple brought a superior PC search feature to it’s OS X operating system in Spotlight while Google CEO Eric Schmidt has been on the board of directors.

Meanwhile, competition comes from downstream, not upstream.  Wolfram Alpha, in my opinion, doesn’t compete in quite the same way as Google, and I anticipate this will create problems for Wolfram Alpha when it comes to monetization.  Google is an intermediary, in that users come to Google to find information, and to be taken to that page on the web.  Wolfram Alpha, meanwhile, seeks to aggregate information from various sources on the web, and present them to the user in concert, on the Wolfram Alpha site.  So Wolfram Alpha’s goal is not to be an intermediary, it is to be a destination that pulls information from a backend, in this case the backend is the world wide web.

But if there is a paradigm shift in the way that people seek information, and how they want that information presented to them, then Wolfram Alpha can be a real threat to Google.  Google is pushing forth an agenda of getting webmasters to contextualize the information on their sites in a standardized way through their recent announcement of Rich Snippets.  This will help all search engines, and even non-search-related technologies on the web, not just Google.  If another company is able to capitalize on the proliferation of this added semantic markup, Google could find itself entering a very real competitive battle.

The Wall Street Journal today ran an interesting article about Google’s IT structure. The interesting part to me is when Douglass Merrill, Google’s CIO, discusses how the company’s security structure works. Instead of focusing on the endpoints such as a computer or a smartphone, the concentration is on making the infrastructure itself more secure. This is especially noteworthy when you think about the migration of common computing applications to the cloud, which in essence deemphasizes the need for security at the level of the computer and shifts that need to the internet based application. This shift of making information accessible in a centrally located place is nothing new, and might even be surprising when you take the blogging example into account. Blogging was supposed to move the locale of information away from the centralized new sources to decentralized, loosely connected individuals. But maybe what it really does is shift the information away from news sources that existed as the spokes and moved it toward the hub, in this case being the cloud. In the end though, the hub-and-spoke model is probably not the best example, but rather a more diversified network where connections exist across various levels but all tend toward a centralized nucleus.