Europe : We need to take on Google

Considering the current short sighted attitude many in Europe take towards the U.S.A. they might just pick up some business.
Google's perceived arrogance can only help.

I wish there was AdSense alternative in Europe. No more taxes....

Lycon and Fast had their chance I think. I think an EU sponsored non-profit should be able to get the job done today. The barriers to entry have never been lower.

Hi Littleman,

I think you are right and wrong at the same time.

In terms of technology out there and skillset open for hire, today is 10,000 times better than in the 1990's. Looking at it from that light you are 1000% correct.

The problem is not with the search engine.. One could have a beta engine built for 100,000-150,000 grand that other than time and diskspace should be on par with Google / Yahoo / MSN ... most of the money spent would go into servers... most of the time would be opensource software... and other cost / time would be outsourcing some programmers to tie it all together.. most of the cost would be in bandwidth and diskspace and to a lesser extent a few guys to run it.

but after you look back and see this mini server cluster you have ... and this search engine that is going out and spidering sites and putting it the index..

That is exactly the same point you will see the problem.

MSN spent 1/4 of a billion dollars in marketing MSN to some Ad Agency... and volia... nothing.. The MARKETING barriers are substantial ... you can't really shoestring a budget together today and expect to win, it's possible but (at least in that market) the chances are stacked against you.

It's a Marketing Problem.. not a technical one.

Hey The Founder,

Yeah sure MS could burn 1/4 billion promoting their SE but, we are still talking about MS -- they are handicapped by brand.

In contrast a government backed non-profit would go viral, its dollar-to-reach ratio would be tremendously higher -- Digg and Slashdot would love any scrap of news about it. If the non-profit search engine was good everyone would want it to succeed. First the seo wold love it, then the geeks, then everyone else.

handicapped by brand

Interesting point --and probably a valid one for MS (a.k.a. The Evil Empire. No wait, maybe Google is the Evil Empire. No wait ...nevermind).

But littleman is right that the positive cachet derived from a populist EU SE would go a long way. After all, we've seen a parallel happen before when the (then) seemingly non-commercial, geek-populist Google toppled AV.

IMHO, branding still doesn't buy you long-term loyalty in a virtual world. I think that's why G has poured on the software swag; sketchup, gmail, picasa, etc.

I hate when I am shown up :) ... hehehe point taken :)

Barriers to entry are lower...

Not really:

Google (depending on the season and the algorithm and the industry) delivers relatively good search results (although you have to know how to coaxe those results out now) - on what is a relatively complete set of data.

MSN and Yahoo deliver varying results on what is a smaller set of data.

Ask delivers good results on a much smaller set of data.

How much hardware are all of those players carrying?

Servers.
Routers.
Connections.

That's the minimum barrier to entry.

I don't think it's all that low.

On top of that you have to have technology at least as good as Google to make much of an impact now. If your technology isn't as good or better, the motivation to switch will be low (Google's European versions are all languaged and language specific and/or country specific (ie. Austrian results or German language results) and fairly adequate for the purpose).

But let's stick to hardware for now. Does anybody know how much hardware the big four are carrying?

Some clues based on nutch.

I wouldn't expect requirements to vary wildly from system to system, you need a lot of everything but you could easily add hardware as your search volume increases.