14 DAY TRIAL // No, no horseshoes in the boxing gloves, it?s going to be a fair fight. Unfortunately. I would have liked to see somebody go up against Google and fight dirty, but I guess that there are laws against this, nowadays, they track you anywhere you are and then they do you in. Eh, well, at least there?s going to be a fight after all, although I?m pretty certain that this will be ended in the first round with a KO from Google.
Rick Skrenta, the co-founder of Topix, a news site and the Open Directory Project and, as I said, the inventor of the first ever computer virus, has decided that Google is too big, so he came up with a means to hurt its supremacy. At least on paper it sounds like a good idea, but the results are rarely the same in real life. Or, in cyberspace, whatever, you choose.
The project is named Blekko and the homepage has already been booked and it presents an image that Google should be scared of. You can see it by either going to www.blekko.com or by looking at the picture on the left, it?s your choice. Those are some scary looking socks, I must admit. Will they be the socks that scare Google? We?ll live and learn if it crashes and burns or if it rises above.
Rick said on his blog that "the idea that what you can see in positions 1-3 above the fold on Google are the sum of what the web has to say about every possible query is crazy. And yet they have 85%+ market share, and little effective competition. At the same time there is such a fabulous business in search. It?s the highest monetization service on the web, by far. Why does this Coke have no Pepsi?"
Well, it?s going to be a while before this will come to be (the real competition, that is), the best prognosis has Blekko out in 2009. It would be happy to go for just 1 percent of the niche at the start? seeing as that means 1 billion dollars.