History repeats itself

Back in the early-ish days of the com­mer­cial Inter­net (circa 95), we were talk­ing about the browser wars to describe the fight between then-leader Netscape Nav­i­ga­tor and Microsoft’s upstart Inter­net Explorer. Should we start talk­ing about the search engine wars as Over­ture and Google are about to go head to head in a new set of battles?

On the left, you’ve got Google, the 2000 pounds gorilla of search which is now look­ing to expand its adver­tis­ing pro­gram beyond its site and is fight­ing to not have its name asso­ci­ated with search­ing on the Inter­net. How­ever, play­ing to its advan­tage is that it now owns a patent on its rank­ing technology.

On the right, you’ve got Over­ture, which once had a busi­ness that most peo­ple fig­ured would fail (after all, who would pay for a place­ment in a search engine?) but some­how man­aged to prove the naysay­ers wrong and is now going out and buy­ing itself a new seat at the search table.

At stake is the future of search but it may be much more. It looks like the mar­ket is reshap­ing itself to become not just about search but also about tar­get­ing. Give the right search result, attach the right ad, and all of a sud­den you’ve got a rede­f­i­n­i­tion of online adver­tis­ing net­works. The funny thing is that we’ve been there before. This was what Dou­bleclick promised but even­tu­ally aban­doned due to pri­vacy con­cerns. I sus­pect that the search engines are headed in a sim­i­lar direc­tion and that his­tory might repeat itself here (and I sus­pect that we may see more peo­ple start­ing to worry about pri­vacy issues sim­i­lar to those that plagued Dou­bleclick a few years ago.