(GOOG)(MSFT)(YHOO)When Achilles mother, Thetis, dipped the child into the river Styx, she held him by his heel. It was at that one spot, which did not get wet, that he was vulnerable.The assumption, which seems to be as safe an money in a vault, is that Google will dominate search for years, if not decades, to come. Google holds something between 40% and 50% of the market, more than No.2 and No.3 Yahoo! and MSN combined.The company’s dominance has driven its market cap to $145 billion. Yahoo!’s is $37 billion.But, late word out of the VC community is that someone may be building a better Google.It seems absurd. Powerset, the new search company, has just raised $12.5 million from two fairly well-known Silicon Valley venture funds. To most large internet companies, that’s lunch money.The new Powerset search technology can apparently discern the meanings between related words. It, in essence, understands sentences and phrases.Most investors will look at Powerset and say that such a small company could never be a threat to Google. Which is probably just the way Yahoo! felt in early 2000 when its stock hit $125. (Google started as a research project at Stamfor University in 1996.)
Weekend Edition: Google And Achilles
Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
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