The news that Yahoo! has decided to switch search engines from Inktomi to Google must have left many laymen and women puzzled last week. Who or what are Inktomi and Google? Who dreams up these daft names anyway? And isn't Yahoo! itself a search engine? Why should it need another one?
The answer to this last question is that Yahoo! began life as a directory of websites, not a search engine. But as it became clear that its staff of indexers could not keep up with the growth of the web, the company contracted out the business of servicing searches to Inktomi, a specialist search engine company based in California.
It turns out that Yahoo! is not alone in this. Inktomi provides search engine facilities to various clients including AOL, Excite@Home, RealNetworks, the Microsoft Network and NBC Internet.
So every time an MSN subscriber (say) types a query, it is serviced not by Microsoft, but by technology created by Inktomi and licensed to MSN.
Why did Yahoo! make the shift? Nobody knows for sure, but here are some possible answers. Firstly, Google is widely regarded as technically superior. It ranks search results using a kind of automated peer review so that a page is judged partly by how many other pages on the Net link to it. Secondly, Google claims that it indexes more documents than anyone else (it was claiming half a billion documents last week) and therefore that searches on it tend to be more comprehensive (i.e. less arbitrary and selective).
Oh, and Google does not take money in return for boosting your site in its rankings, a fact which endears it to geeks and drives business folks to distraction.
Because the web is so vast, and grows so quickly, no search engine, not even Google, can provide anything other than a partial index. That means that users searching for information are dependent on their chosen search engines.
It also means that proprietors of search engines possess economic power, for they define who's visible and who is not.
As the world shifts increasingly to e-commerce, a presence in cyberspace will come to be as important as the possession of factories, offices and shops in the real world.
And if search engines can't, or won't, find your site then you will be, to all intents and purposes, rendered invisible. So one of the key concerns of businesses and organisations will be to ensure that when people go looking for them on the web, their site will be ranked prominently by the major search engines.
At present, search engine rankings are determined either by algorithms (like, say, the peer-linking algorithm employed by Google) or by economics. In the latter case, rankings can be improved by payments or by 'partnership' deals - which are really just payments in another guise.
However rankings are determined, the inescapable fact is that search engines already wield considerable power, and that this power is exercised entirely without regulation.
There is, in other words, a politics of search engines. Or, rather, there should be, for it's no good saying that the market will take care of the problem, that search engines will rise or fall depending on the quality of the service they offer to customers or users. An exclusively market-driven solution will lead to a web where the most visible organisations will be those with the deepest pockets and the widest range of partnership deals.
Alarmed by this prospect, Oneworld.org - a leading portal for NGOs and organisations interested in environmental issues and sustainable development - has already created its own specialist search engine precisely to avoid the looming threat of 'virtual invisibility'. You could say it was a way of ensuring that the Yahoos of this world do not inherit the earth.
