Business as war is a trope that journalists haven't been able to leave alone in the 20+ years I've been covering Silicon Valley, even in the most peaceful times. It's become distressingly common as fighting has intensified in Iraq and the rest of us citizen-soldiers are supposed to keep Silicon Valley, and the rest of the homeland, safe from terrorists.

Markoff's martial prose covers all the hot spots in the latest war to control the personal computer desktop: Google's challenge to Microsoft with a Desktop Search function that searches the Web as well as files on the user's computer, the new Google Print feature to compete with Amazon.com's Search-Inside-the-Book, plus Google SMS to enable Web searches from a cell phone.

Microsoft, Yahoo!, and a host of new contenders - Vivissimo, Idealab, Amazon's new A9 search engine, Apple's upcoming Tiger - are in there fighting, too. And what a fight it is!

Markoff notes an "explosion," a "burst of activity," "furiously intensified efforts." Even as new battles begin, these armies of software engineers and marketing guerillas are "refighting the battles of the past."

Just as CNN or MSNBC or Fox News lets ex-generals second-guess the latest military maneuvers in Iraq, Markoff invites expert observers to comment on the chances of Microsoft and Yahoo! checking upstart Google's bold advance.

Unfortunately, also like the Iraq war, when the smoke clears and the dust settles and the casualties have been carted off the battlefields, questions arise: just what's been won? And, who won it?

Markoff astutely observes that "the search market, one of the Internet's most profitable areas, will increasingly be shaped by brand and other nontechnology factors."

This confirms what I heard from some very smart software engineers at a search engine start-up firm a few years ago, during my stint as an editor at Knowledge Management magazine.

They demonstrated technology that could run circles around Google and Yahoo!, producing search results far more precise and useful, albeit on enterprise information sets much smaller than the burgeoning Web.

Why not sell it to them? I asked.

They're not interested in making the necessary investment to implement it for the Web, was the reply.

Convinced that Internet users were reasonably satisfied with search results, the established search engine companies realized that brand name recognition and high-profile advertising programs would win the market share war. They were happy to leave the high-horsepower indexing schemes and advanced algorithms to companies that serve niche markets like enterprise knowledge management.

In the restaurant business, it's not the steak, it's the sizzle.

In the search engine wars, will shock and awe prevail?

Links:

Google Envy Is Fomenting Search Wars by John Markoff, New York Times, 18 October 2004