Turning the tables

In Reading the Google Tea Leaves, Tristan Louis has sorted competitive search offerings into handy tables that clarify the playing field, such as it is (or they are... because many are rolled into few here). The selected players are Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL.

I'm a broken record (scratched CD?) on this, so I'll repeat it again... while it's always good to know What The Big Guys Are Up To, we have to remember that it's small and independent developers that often lead the way. Without them we wouldn't have the Net, the Web, browsers, blogging, podcasting, syndication, aggregation, tagging, VoIP, content management systems (such as Drupal, which is what I'm using right now), or every open source project you can name.

Or search.

Funny thing about search is that I spend just as much time on the Live Web engines (Bloglines, Blogpulse, Feedster, Google Blog Search, IceRocket, Pubsub and Technorati) — and what they feed my aggregators — than I do on Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL's search engines. And I'm hardly alone. Check this Alexa comparison of daily reach for Technorati vs. Amazon's A9 search engine. Technorati moved ahead back in June, and (with the exception of one short spike by A9) has increased its lead ever since. (Disclosure: I'm on Technorati's advisory board; but I chose this comparison because Technorati's results speak for growing heat in a field that gets ignored in most comparisons of Leading Search Engines.)

Back to Tristan's piece.

He concludes with a list of likely future offerings by Google, including Web hosting, auctions and a calendar product.

The Web hosting possibility is an interesting one. Apple and others offer small amounts of hosting now. To me the big market-changer is offsite backup. Katrina and other recent natural disasters have brought home the need for better offsite backup solutions. Like many users, my ad hoc solution involves a growing pile of external drives that I keep meaning to put in a safer place than the closet where they're piling up now.

The gating factor is broadband upload speed. All the carriers have never been able to imagine a world other than the asymmetrical ones from which they came. Hence the broad-down/narrow-up offerings they've had for the duration.

But what happens when somebody big starts offering big offsite backup, and hosting as well? With its massive experience with installing and maintaining zillions of servers, Google and Yahoo would be ideal candidates for those kinds of offerings.

Right now offsite storage is mostly centered around hosting. But backup is the bigger market, because nearly everybody needs it, and there's not much out there right now that's easy for an ordinary user to use. Not even Apple's .Mac offering is easy.

Think about it. Terabyte offsite storage for ordinary citizens at attractive prices.

Jeez, that's a killer idea. Can't believe I just gave it away.

Maybe some of the hosting guys could offer it. That makes sense.

It would be a perfect business for the carriers to get into — a great way for, say, SBC and Comcast to grab and retain deep, direct and abiding customer relationships that survive whatever changes befall their legacy phone and cable industries.

Attention carriers! You've just received $billion piece of advice, for free! (How much anybody wanna bet that NONE of them will take it? Heh. Thought so.)

So that leaves the Googles of the world.

(Anybody want to bet against that one? Hmm?)