Raja Jasti’s Blog - Renaissance Thinking

Google may not satisfy the strict definition of monopoly when it comes to search. But the market behavior indicates the strong monopolistic advantages that Google holds in search and the almost non-existent odds for the competitors (anyone outside of the deep pocketed Microsoft) to succeed in this market. Cases in point: #2 search company getting out of search business (Yahoo selling out to #3 search company in MS); Now ask.com (#4 provider) is throwing in the towel too.

BOSTON (Reuters) - Internet mogul Barry Diller has ended his IAC/InterActiveCorp’s quest to develop Internet search technology to rival that of Google Inc and Microsoft Corp.

IAC’s Ask.com unit said on Tuesday it has decided to buy its Web search results from one of its rivals, but it declined to say which one, citing a clause in the contract.

Ask will lay off 130 engineers who had been dedicated to building the search engine, and also get rid of thousands of computer servers that stored billions of pages of data.

“The development of search as a technology has become commoditized. To continue to invest our own resources to do web search doesn’t make sense because that development is expensive and doesn’t give you a differentiated product,” Ask President Doug Leeds said by telephone.

The move by Ask, a unit of IAC whose revenue has helped IAC post stronger-than-expected profit in its two most recent quarters — leaves only two key providers of search results: Google and Microsoft. Yahoo withdrew from the business last year when it signed a deal to get its results from Microsoft’s Bing engine. Leeds would not say if Ask was getting its results from either of those companies.

There are some new companies such as Blekko trying to take a crack at competing against Google. But the odds are stacked against the newcomers. This is bad news for innovation in search.

RockMelt is a new browser that  integrates social and search layers to the web browsing experience.

On Monday, RockMelt, a company founded and financed by a group of Netscape alumni, will release a new Web browser, 16 years after Netscape introduced the first commercial Internet browser, and 12 years after the company was sold to AOL after its defeat by Microsoft in the so-called browser wars.

“We think it is a fantastic time to build a company around a browser,” said Marc Andreessen, who co-founded Netscape, and whose venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, is the principal financial backer of RockMelt.

Although most people spend more time using their Web browser than any other program on their computers, most browsers have not kept up with the evolution of the Web into a social media hub, Mr. Andreessen said. He and Mr. Campbell, a former Netscape board member who is advising the new company as well as investing in it, say RockMelt is a browser for the Facebook era.

At first glance, RockMelt looks like an ordinary browser, a digital windowpane onto the Web. But along the side of its main window are two thin rails with icons, one showing a user’s friends on the left, and another displaying a user’s favorite social sites, including Twitter and Facebook, on the right.

A “share” button makes it easy to post a Web page, a YouTube video or any other items, to Facebook, Twitter or other sites. Similarly, users can update their status or keep tabs on their friends’ activities on any social network right on their main browser window. They can also easily add and remove friends, or chat with them, on the left-side rail.

When a user searches the Web using Google, RockMelt not only delivers the Google search results, but also fetches the pages associated with those results, so a user can preview those pages quickly and decide which to click to.

“Had we known about Facebook and Twitter and Google back in ’92 or ’93, we would have built them into the browser,” Mr. Andreessen said, referring to Netscape. “This is an opportunity to go back and do it right.”

Like other browsers, RockMelt will be free, and like the popular open-source browser Firefox, it plans to make money by earning a share of the revenue from Web searches conducted by its users.

For all its modern features, the challenges facing RockMelt, which is inviting users to try a test version on Monday, are enormous. The browser market has become intensely competitive in recent years and is dominated by giants like Microsoft, Apple and Google, as well as Mozilla, which makes Firefox.

“Getting heard above the noise is going to be hard,” said David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School and the co-author of “Competing on Internet Time,” a book that chronicled the battle between Netscape and Microsoft.

RockMelt is built on top of Chrome, Google’s open source browser which itself is having a difficult time gaining meaningful market share.

They are betting web surfing going social just as similar bets on TV watching experience.

While the concept sounds intriguing to me, my gut feeling is that this is going in the wrong direction. The market need  is for simpler, faster and more secure browsing experience. This looks too bloated from the looks of it. Their best bet is targeting heavy users of social media as the beach head and go from there.

Here is the TechCrunch interview video of RockMelt’s founders: