Search Engine Fight to the Death
Pinsent-Masons have a wonderful e-letter called Out-law which focuses on the law of technology. Today’s issue has a piece called Search Engine Wars by Andy Atkins-Kruger, which is a provocative read.
There may only be room for one winner in the battle of the titans, which will soon break out in the search market. MSN and Google, antler to antler, have been eyeing each other up for the last year – each trying to exploit their own strengths and overcome their weaknesses as they face a competition in which the stakes are all too high.
Out-Law claims that this is outright war: Microsoft is seething with anger at not being taken seriously enough in the search market.
Expect to see a major battle for Google’s market-share with all sorts of deals being cut with sites which have rich archives.
And sites with rich archives pretty much describes substantive legal sites. Is this the way round the limitations of the Austlii, Bailii, Canlii search engines?
I have been reading OutLaw for a few years and agree with you. This is the front end of Masons (now merged with Pinsents) efforts to experiment on three fronts: new way of marketing legal services; new way of pricing legal services and developing an alternative brand which is startlingly different from the stodgy construction/engineering focus that made Masons famous. They were well known but pigeonholed as a firm. OutLaw was and is a very successful effort to break out.