You know, I think the possibility of a better search & monetization tool coming out that kills Google’s user base is why Google is throwing a lot of effort towards building up switching costs now with stuff like gmail and google checkout. But as Yahoo saw, just having an email account with Yahoo doesn’t mean your preferred search engine is always Yahoo.

“He goes on to articulate that even if a competitor closes the functionality gap, they then must overcome the brand perception gap, which may be even more difficult. In turn, he recommends that Yahoo! (and assumedly all others) should “accept Google’s search and monetization dominance” and act accordingly, because they will never recover from Google’s lead. ”

I am kind of surprised at this analysis. After all, how people have searched the internet has changed a great deal in the past ten years, with many companies changing leads during that span of time. Remember things like Metacrawler, etc.? Many of these were dominant at their time & lost their luster when someone came along with something better. In addition, having a lot of money at stake in the search business does mean that someone is always go to look for ways to innovate over the existing market leader(s).

The successful search engine of the future will be the one that reaches back to a very basic tennant of business- Customer Focus. As an individual search user, I am not treated as a customer. I am more like raw material being consumed. My profile is important but my customer values are not. Who cares if I am served irrelevant or worse misleading links?

The next wave of search, in my view, will have little to nothing to do with faster or more comprehensive “correction” of a search (e.g. ignoring apostrophes, periods, common misspellings, etc.), all things Google does well enough now.

The next wave will instead potentially offer several new services:

1. Pattern recognition and search automation. If I am constantly looking for terms which collectively add up to “Wikinomics”, for instance, a “search bin of new entries” is kept current for me, or refreshed periodically. Moreover, my own usage allows the system to make suggestions and save me the trouble of creating/modifying/deleting old patterns.

2. Separately, it might look at what I choose to look at, and consider that in prioritization of results. If I find (to take but an example from our blog list on the side of the page) Clay Shirky, Ray Ozzie and Seth Godin and others in their circles useful (by clicking on those choices) and do not click on Media 3.0, Fast Company and Tim O’Reilly and others in their circles (by not clicking on those choices, or by not clicking more than once) then, despite the ‘normal’ sequence, I should see things I am likely to want to see early in the process – perhaps “salted” with one or two “close matches” to see if my choices expand/change.

3. Or perhaps the next engine actually analyses tone, language, quality of comments as well as postings, emotional indices, etc. and allows me to indulge/avoid the 99%+ of postings that are merely annoying to weed through (Sturgeon’s Law – that 90% of everything is bull—t – is upped by at least one order of magnitude in the blogosphere based on a cursory reading of comments on sites I actually want to follow).

4. Or finally perhaps the search engine pays attention to the content in some reasonable fashion and figures out the difference between the site that lists the works of Hemingway and the one that has the works of Hemingway. Or the one that indexes the sites with content vs the actual content. In other words, something that digs down to a layer of usefulness ordinary search does not do readily today.

There’s four value propositions for a Google-buster – or four new business lines for Google just as easily. For if they don’t seize these types of changes they will be displaced – and none of their “other services” are any more sticky than any of Yahoo!’s were. (I speak as someone with mail accounts and userids on both services; both are historical left-overs and neither is important to me any more.)