After Google: who will be the next web sensation?

How small start-ups can grow to be big players
Nothing lasts forever. When Google launched, Yahoo and AltaVista controlled search. When the web started to grow, Compuserve, AOL and even the Microsoft Network considered it a poor cousin to their gated communities.

Today, Google dominates search, but there's always another major player around the corner; a revolutionary service that comes from nowhere to change the way we use the web. Right now, Twitter is the darling, but will it last? And what's next?

As a general rule, the internet doesn't reward big showy launches. Almost everything begins low-key, attracting the early adopter crowd with impressive sounding technology and the chance to get in on the ground floor, before widening out with some form of soft launch and then finally hitting the mainstream.

This approach often works best because the early tests have given the creators a better idea of what people want to do with the tool in the real world. Twitter is an excellent example of this, having gone from a side-project at a podcasting company to a microblogging service and now a huge sprawling empire filled with everything from personal status updates to celebrity stalking, social media services and real-time updates on developing news stories.

The podcasting service, which was originally intended to be the creators' bread and butter, has long since been sold off into obscurity. So just because a tool hasn't set the world on fire right now, there's no reason that it can't in the future. Even if it doesn't, an idea that nobody got excited about today might be tomorrow's next big thing, or vice versa.

Friendster was one of the big early social networking successes, but it soon fell out of favour because after adding your friends and saying nice things about them, there wasn't a whole lot else to do. Facebook's early focus on university life, followed by its moves towards being an application platform and wider social hub, stole the genre right out from under its feet.

A Google world

Whatever the next big thing turns out to be, you can be sure that it'll start off small. Google is a great example of how even a company with a firm grip on technology and an excellent reputation can fail to capitalise on that fully. Its only truly world-shaking services to date are its search, advertising, maps, RSS reader and mail applications.

That sounds like a long list, until you look at the failed attempts at social networks, the 3D worlds, the online photo sharing, the instant messaging platform, the gadgets, the homepages, the online page creator tools, Checkout, Answers… the list goes on.

That's not to say that these haven't achieved some success; it's just that in no way does Google own the whole world beyond the point of competition. Much of the reason is that many of these projects emerged not as a dedicated Google service, but from individual engineers working on ideas in their much hyped 20 per cent time – the fifth of their working lives devoted to building things with Google's tools.

This succeeded in giving Google a huge armoury of online applications, but not the hunger to make sure they succeeded. Most were released without much fanfare, and then promptly forgotten about or just plain ignored.

Even bought-in services such as Blogger, Jaiku (a Twitter competitor) and Dodgeball (location broadcasting) have largely sat in perpetual beta, unchanged and unloved, much in the same way that Microsoft put Internet Explorer on the backburner after defeating Netscape back in the day. A company reliant on a couple of tools simply can't afford to let this drift happen. Being small and hungry can be a service's best asset.
2.Beating Google at the search game
Searching for inspiration

Beating Google at the search engine game may not be totally impossible, but it's about as close as you can get without trying to eat the sun using a fork. To even be in with a chance, two things need to happen. First, you need to have a phenomenal idea that catches on. Second, Google has to screw up.

Had Yahoo not decided that what people really wanted from their search pages was a huge unwieldy portal, had the likes of AltaVista not been renowned for getting millions of search results instead of the right ones, there would never have been a proper opening for Google to sneak in with its minimal service.

As it is, Google is too reliable to be beaten. It's sleek, it's easy and it gives you the correct answers more often than it fails. There's simply no reason to switch away from it as your default search engine, no matter how nice the alternatives happen to be. However, Google doesn't have the market sewn up, not by a long shot.

Its size is its main weakness, best seen by its reluctance to even add options onto the mighty google.com front page. More sweeping changes, especially the kind that fundamentally alter the way its engine works or are presented to the world, risk throwing away its precious dominance.

Taking a bite from Google's pie

Two recent services in particular have the potential to take a bite out of its market. The first is Wolfram Alpha which has the power to compute answers instead of simply presenting pages. Google can do this on a small scale, such as converting weights in kilograms into stones, but nothing on this scale – at least, not yet.

The second is Twitter. The service heralds a world of real-time search, one where you can find out what's going on right at the very second that you're typing words into the search box. This is perfect for following breaking news (as evidenced by the deluge of posts about the Mumbai shootings last year) or finding out what's going on at a big awards or industry show. Essentially, it will be excellent for finding out about anything that you just can't wait for the Google spiders to pick up.

Both of these tools are on Google's radar, with realtime search currently its next big project. However, Google is at a disadvantage here. Its trademark simplicity means that there's a limit to how much data it can push at people when they do a search.

After all, most of its users never even bother with the tools it already provides – an example is the Advanced Options, which make it possible to find only results from the last 24 hours and to sort results by date. A service that makes one of these more specific searches its sole focus could effectively own the market – and owning the market would give it a chance to widen its scope into the far more well-trodden ground of general internet searching as well.

Anything more subtle than these sweeping changes will be too little, too late. Or just too gimmicky. We've seen companies put a face on searches – most famously with Ask Jeeves, but also with Microsoft's experimental Ms Dewey – and slap on related searches or work via pictures, such as with Teoma and Cuil, but they've never been enough.

As for searching new types of media, such as video content or documents, that's the kind of feature that Google could easily integrate into its standard search engine if it wanted to without having to radically change the standard look or feel of the site. Whatever the next Google is, we can guarantee that it'll have a social networking element.

Aside from the fact that a community gives people a reason to stick with a service, algorithms will never be able to work out something as simple as what people enjoy as quickly and easily as having those people tell you via a thumbs-up button.
How 10 popular Web 2.0 companies might fare
Searching for inspiration

Beating Google at the search engine game may not be totally impossible, but it's about as close as you can get without trying to eat the sun using a fork. To even be in with a chance, two things need to happen. First, you need to have a phenomenal idea that catches on. Second, Google has to screw up.

Had Yahoo not decided that what people really wanted from their search pages was a huge unwieldy portal, had the likes of AltaVista not been renowned for getting millions of search results instead of the right ones, there would never have been a proper opening for Google to sneak in with its minimal service.

As it is, Google is too reliable to be beaten. It's sleek, it's easy and it gives you the correct answers more often than it fails. There's simply no reason to switch away from it as your default search engine, no matter how nice the alternatives happen to be. However, Google doesn't have the market sewn up, not by a long shot.

Its size is its main weakness, best seen by its reluctance to even add options onto the mighty google.com front page. More sweeping changes, especially the kind that fundamentally alter the way its engine works or are presented to the world, risk throwing away its precious dominance.

Taking a bite from Google's pie

Two recent services in particular have the potential to take a bite out of its market. The first is Wolfram Alpha which has the power to compute answers instead of simply presenting pages. Google can do this on a small scale, such as converting weights in kilograms into stones, but nothing on this scale – at least, not yet.

The second is Twitter. The service heralds a world of real-time search, one where you can find out what's going on right at the very second that you're typing words into the search box. This is perfect for following breaking news (as evidenced by the deluge of posts about the Mumbai shootings last year) or finding out what's going on at a big awards or industry show. Essentially, it will be excellent for finding out about anything that you just can't wait for the Google spiders to pick up.

Both of these tools are on Google's radar, with realtime search currently its next big project. However, Google is at a disadvantage here. Its trademark simplicity means that there's a limit to how much data it can push at people when they do a search.

After all, most of its users never even bother with the tools it already provides – an example is the Advanced Options, which make it possible to find only results from the last 24 hours and to sort results by date. A service that makes one of these more specific searches its sole focus could effectively own the market – and owning the market would give it a chance to widen its scope into the far more well-trodden ground of general internet searching as well.

Anything more subtle than these sweeping changes will be too little, too late. Or just too gimmicky. We've seen companies put a face on searches – most famously with Ask Jeeves, but also with Microsoft's experimental Ms Dewey – and slap on related searches or work via pictures, such as with Teoma and Cuil, but they've never been enough.

As for searching new types of media, such as video content or documents, that's the kind of feature that Google could easily integrate into its standard search engine if it wanted to without having to radically change the standard look or feel of the site. Whatever the next Google is, we can guarantee that it'll have a social networking element.

Aside from the fact that a community gives people a reason to stick with a service, algorithms will never be able to work out something as simple as what people enjoy as quickly and easily as having those people tell you via a thumbs-up button.