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	Reading: The Next Google? An Interview With Neil Patel

If you had a crystal ball, or an Internet Time Machine, 15 years ago and could have seen the explosion in Internet Dating, what would you have done?  Remember, back in the day, Yahoo Singles, was the end all and be all in dating sites.  It was free, they introduced video, it had all the volume and users. Yet, if you had said, "This model doesn't work, there will be pay sites popping up that do dating by niches and certain areas that will make hundreds of millions of dollars" you would have been laughed at.

The same case can be made for search engines.  In 1990, if you had told anyone that in 20 years Yahoo would be irrelevant in search and that AOL would barely even exit you would have been laughed at as well.  Lets fast forward to 2010 and make the statement that will get laughed at, "Google search volume has peaked, and so has their power".

How can we possibly say this and have any credibility?

1.Main Competitors are Getting Stronger - Google controls 65% of search volume. I think they hit a high of 70% when their two main competitors, Yahoo and Microsoft, were in "search shambles".  Now that their two main competitors have teamed up and have a presentable product, they will start to gain some market share.  We are not saying they are a serious threat to Google, just that "they couldn't get any lower, and now that they have their act together, they can only go up". (which will take a few % points from Google)

2. Facebook - The only company that Google publically fears.  Plus, Facebook is introducing their own search engine soon based on tags and "likes".  This will naturally get volume.

3.  The Internet content stream is doubling so quickly that there is just too much information for one search engine to give all users a satisfactory set of results.  The "trying to please everyone, all the time" is bound to fail and cause some to look for other niche search engines in a similar fashion that Yahoo Singles' "one big dating site for everyone" lead to the growth of niche dating sites.  You can't be everything to everyone with content doubling so quickly on the Internet.  The motto of "showing every single bit of information on a subject ever written in 0.04 seconds" cannot be sustained at that rate content is doubling on the net.  Hence, Google's quest for energy farms, electrical licenses and server farms.

4. Google is highly inefficient - Believe it or not, they are inefficient on purpose because it leads to higher revenue. If 99.99% of searchers never go past page 20 in results, why would you show 200,000 pages of results for every search?  Think about it. If a subject has 2 million results, and Google shows 10 results per page, that is 200,000 pages of results (all brought to you in 1.3 seconds).  Yet, Google knows that "statistical zero" will go page 20.  So every search that yields 2 million results, only the first 40-80 of those results will ever be viewed, and the rest will never be seen.  Why would a company invest so much time and money (server farms, energy farms, etc) into putting together 99% of their results that will never be seen?  As Neil Patel says, because they must be making more money doing it this way than by not doing it this way.

4. The Process is Already Happening - Wolfram Alpha is math based search engine that is very firmly planted on the Internet.  NowRelevant.com is a search engine that shows you everything about a subject for the past two weeks without any SPAM or SEO dummy sites.

5. Start Up Price- As technology advances, the price for programming, hardware, software and everything comes down. The "barrier to entry" as Warren Buffett likes to talk about in investing is becoming lower and lower. The startup cost for a new search engine is probably between one million and two million dollars, at least to get a beta working.  This may sound like a lot of money, but when venture capital, hedge funds, and private equity are involved, this is chump change.

If you are interested in finding out what the most "sought after" new search engines people are looking for but don't exist yet, check out the membership posts on "10 Best Ideas For New Search Engines".  We go over worldwide conversations and searches involving the word "search" or "search engine" to see what people types of search engines people are actually currently looking for in real time.  This is like being back in 1990 and seeing Yahoo Singles dominate, yet finding out there is huge demand for "Indian dating site",  "Jewish dating site",  "Christian dating site" or "adult dating site" before anyone else. If you start Friendfinder or AdultFriendfinder 20 years ago based on logical information, you would be well retired by today.

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