Google, Now Wealthier, Enters New Corporate Phase

But partying aside, the quirky six-year-old company has some serious business ahead. The Internet search engine giant must cope not just with the deeper public scrutiny of its new corporate phase but also with some cutthroat competition.

Rivals chipping away at Google's dominance range from small startups like Vivisimo Inc. -with ambitions that echo Google's -to tech titans like Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp., which have been beefing up search features on their popular Internet portals.

``Google came out of nowhere and it's entirely possible that the next big competitor could come out of nowhere, too,'' said Tara Calishain, co-author of ``Google Hacks'' and author of the soon-to-be-released ``Web Search Garage.''

Calishain cited how former leading search engines have faltered or gotten swallowed by larger rivals. One-time search engine heavyweight AltaVista, for instance, struggled against Google's rising star and has since shifted through several owners, its latest being Yahoo.

Google's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, started the company in 1998 and the scrappy startup has since become synonymous with Internet search.

Google's success -the ability to profit handsomely from unobtrusive text ads linked to searches as well as its right-on-the-mark bet that people needed a good way to cull the vast amounts of information floating on the Internet -has only proven to others, including Yahoo and Microsoft, that the business of search is indeed viable.

And now Google's new status as a publicly traded company ``highlights that good information retrieval technology is important in the economy and the marketplace,'' said Raul Valdez-Perez, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University and founder and chief executive of Vivisimo, a Google competitor.

Many attribute Google's success to its underlying search engine technology combined with its friendly and simple user design. But competitors are consistently aiming to one-up Google, which is why experts say Google cannot let its technology get stale.

Yahoo, for instance, has recently introduced a so-called RSS mode, which lets users get topical or keyword search results back in a popular newsfeed-like capsule listing.

And Vivisimo clusters information from the Web and organizes it into category folders when users conduct a keyword search _ a different approach than Google, which lists its search results based on popularity. With Google, a site ranks higher when there are more links to it.

The Google formula, for now, has worked and been mimicked by competitors, but Google as well as its competitors have yet to harness all the information that is available on Internet.

Google has indexed more than 4 billion Web pages, but that's only a fraction of what's out there because there are countless databases and networks that are hard to reach and are proprietary.

``I think Google does well with going after the masses, but they don't do well with specialized information,'' said Nancy Blachman, author of the online Google Guide tutorial and wife of a Google engineer. ``They're just showing you the most popular page which may or may not be authoritative.''

For its part, Google has invested more on its future technology, spending $91 million in research and development in 2003, up from $31.7 million the previous year.

Over the years, Google has steadily added a stream of search features, such as Froogle, a shopping and merchandise search engine, and Google News, an automated news aggregation service. It has also started to expand into other potentially revenue-generating areas with its newest revision to Blogger.com to help users create Web journals; the acquisition of Picasa, an online photo service; and its recent introduction of G-mail, a free e-mail service.

But many of those are areas and features in which Google is playing catch-up.

``Nothing is guaranteed,'' Calishain said. ``Google's technology is tremendous, but that doesn't protect them from challenges.''

We'll have to wait and see how Google decides to spend its new cash.

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