Start-Up Aims at Google

The article, Start-Up Aims at Google, discusses Google’s future competition, Bekko. Bekko will begin serving customers on Monday. Although competing with Google is a daunting task, Bekko has received much praise. It is Bekko’s goal to gain market share by thriving in the areas in which Google struggles. Professionals say that Google struggles because it’s a “proliferation of search results of dubious quality. Sites listed often are filled with content whose source is unclear.” Bekko will attempt to solve this problem by using a “Google-style search algorithm” however will also put responsibility on the users to select website they desire for queries. This will help in making the searches more specific and not overloading them with information. Bekko is also attempting to reduce the amount of spam; their chief executive said, “We’re cleaning this up …using large-scale human curation.” Over the past few months, they have been testing Bekko and created collections of websites, which people can search through. This will help the site to trigger limited searches for certain queries.

I found this article interesting because Bekko could potentially be one of Google’s main competitors. In recent years Bing has become much more popular and I think it’d be interesting to see if Bekko has the same capabilities. Whenever I go online to research a topic, my first instinct is to go to Google. This article made me wonder if maybe someday, Bekko will be my first option when choosing among search engines.

I believe the idea behind Bekko is very interesting. They have analyzed the flaws of the number one search engine and have decided to try to solve those problems, apply the solutions to their own company, and take market share in that industry. However there are some flaws with Bekko’s strategy. Within their queries, certain sites have been identified as “authoritative information sources.” While this is good because the sites they include are the most important with the best academic information, sometimes the lesser-known sites offer the information people are looking for. For instance, maybe someone doesn’t need the scientific definition of some type of sickness but wants to know people opinions on specific medicines offered. Although the information Bekko offers is considered to be high quality info, it could potentially frustrate users because they may not be able to get what they’re looking for. This is a hard problem to solve because it’s hard to predict the type of information all people are looking for. Different people look for different things so narrowing the queries to only academic information may cut their market in half, not allowing them to be competitive with Google.

There are many commercials these days talking about information overload. They point out that if you don’t type in a specific enough term for a search, everything relating to that term will come up. I chose this article because recently people have become very critical of information overload. Before it was more so accepted but as the article stated, search quality is worse now than it ever was in the past. Bekko is making advancements towards helping this quality increase beyond its past level.

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