Heh, Bill is giving me lots of stuff to talk about tonight at a certain party at a certain Mountain View, CA location that I’m not allowed to blog about. Sorry, not my rules.
Editor’s Note: As Robert points out, the search industry has a great deal of untapped resources companies like Google, Yahoo, and MSN could capitalize on. What is the next area of search you’d like to see tackled (besides the Jagger update)? Discuss at WebProWorld.
Larry and Sergey (the two main Google guys) tell me that the competition between Google and its competitors are way overexaggerated, by the way. I agree and yes, I just did break the blog quotation rules here. . It’s all about who does the best job for people. I’ve been meeting with execs from all over the world (only a small percentage of them are from Google) all day long and I see total untapped opportunity. I mean, freaking, big, untapped opportunity. The kind where people who run major media companies walk up to you and say “can you help us?” Google and MSN and Yahoo all put together haven’t even tapped a small percentage of the potential opportunity. We’re all leaving money on the table.
So, the challenge for all of our companies is to go after the untapped markets. If you’re a gold miner, are you gonna get rich by mining where other people and companies have mined already? Maybe, but it’s a lot harder work. Why not look at the vein that’s totally being ignored.
No one has nailed time-based search. No one has really nailed people-based search. No one has nailed metrics (can I go to any search engine and see a list of everyone I’ve ever linked to and how many times I’ve linked – or the other way, how many people have linked to me and how many times they’ve linked to me?)
Has anyone figured out really how to put blogs and photos on maps? Has anyone figured out how to mix professional news and amateur news in a way that demonstrates the correctness/authority/reputation of the article itself and the author in aggregate?
Has anyone figured out how to make advertising fun? Has anyone figured out how to report back to the search engines which people have actually bought anything after clicking on an ad and which ones just looked?
Has anyone figured out how to really translate from Farsi to Chinese to Japanese to English and back?
Has anyone figured out how to put a search engine onto an iPod?
Shall I go on? There’s lots of work in this industry for hundreds of companies to do without stepping on each other’s toes. When all the Internet challenges get done then we can worry about fighting.
Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.
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