A Coming Battle Which Will Likely Transform the Face of Online Searching.

It’s what’s behind the vast buildings of the new Googleplex being built beside the Oregon river.

It’s the battle between a special investment of $2 Billion that Microsoft is pouring into R&D for online search tools and $1.5 Billion that Google has allocated for its team to build a better engine.

The fruits of that have started to show in the increasingly useful deployment of geographically linked search results that appear in Google results with a compass logo.

But the Holy Grail of search technologies is to gain a sustained competitive advantage in relevance rankings. And this is where we’re likely to get tangible results soon.

Those who remember the data when Netscape was the dominant browser will also recall that once Bill Gates had realized Microsoft’s strategic error in discounting the importance of the Internet, Microsoft poured significant resources into enhancing Microsoft’s own browser Internet Explorer.

But Netscape was a puny performer with a great set of tools but little profitability. Google has been in the black since the outset and its IPO was the apogee of the going public phenomenon.

Since then little appears to slow the growth of the stock price. Its a formidable foe. But lots of companies have underestimated Microsoft’s tenacity and the size of the war chest.

And of course there are others keenly interested in the next generation of search. Yahoo has been claiming extraordinarily high figures for the number of pages indexed and needs to have relevance enhancements to match the majors.

What does this mean for the legal information community in Canada that forms the backbone of Slaw’s readership?

My predictions are:

* expect major announcements of significant breakthroughs. Treat them sceptically but whoever achieves a real advantage will simply spur the other to match or exceed.

* expect patent litigation too as a way of slowing down advance and distracting management. The lessons of NTP v. RIM aren’t lost on the majors.

* And finally, I wonder at what point the great leaps-forward in the public world of the open web, will migrate to the specialized world of legal online. Since Turtle and Croft’s pioneering work which led to Westlaw’s natural language breakthrough in the early 1990sAlthough see the tantalizingly brief Effective Collection Metasearch in a Hierarchical Environment: Global vs. Localized Retrieval Performance, published out of Eagan a few years back., Eagan’s innovations seem to be less publicly trumpeted. At what point will Google’s link-based popularity algorithms start to influence Westlaw and Lexis?

I find it odd that Google can suggest news articles that it thinks I might like, and that my Google searches contain hits highlighted for North Toronto, yet each time I go onto the legal databases, I am assumed to be a generic user, without geographic or search preferences.

I have always said that the rationale for the survival of the expensive specialized services has to be enhanced customer value, but at times I wonder whether the majors survive simply because of the depth of the historical archive. Their advantage certainly doesn’t seem to stem from their search tools.

And the size of the MSN and Google investments may just leave them further behind.