
Where’s the Firefox for Search?  - buckpost
http://www.markevanstech.com/2008/06/18/wheres-the-firefox-for-search/
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delano
_So, here’s the question: why has Firefox been able to do so well in the
browser market against the dominant player, while a new and exciting player
has yet to emerge in the search engine market to take on Google?_

Firefox is a shippable product and Google Search is a service. Creating and
operating a service is very expensive, particularly given the amount of data
involved in searching the web. There is an open source alternative, Lucene,
which again is a product and not a service, but they are still far from Google
(btw, has anyone applied Lucene to web search?). Search is a very difficult
problem.

And Google Search is ubiquitous so competition is left to niche markets
anyway. Octopart.com (electronic parts) and WorldWideScience.org (scientific
research), for example. Google Search is becoming more specific too though
(theatre/show time data, weather, music/band results, ISBN, etc...) so the
gaps are narrowing. Plus it works well -- there's no compelling story to
replace it at this point.

Ultimately, if it's possible to satisfy everyone's search needs from a single
box, Google's box will be the first to do it.

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noelchurchill
Where's the IE for search? The success of Firefox was a result of IE being a
crappy browser. Google does a pretty good job at search.

~~~
delano
<http://www.live.com/>

~~~
noelchurchill
Live.com is hardly the IE of search.

~~~
delano
Maybe I misunderstood what you meant. Can you explain?

