More, transcribed from last week's Waxxi 'Cast with Seth.
On a question regarding Ask.com, and its Algorithm campaign, Seth's response:
What's the Dip if you're a search engine and you want to beat Google? Well, the Dip is a trillion dollar Dip, because most people no longer believe they have a search problem. They're not looking for a better alternative than Google. So there isn't enough advertising money in the world, I believe, to fundamentally change your market share by interrupting people and saying, 'Hey, look at us!'
And so, I wouldn't have spent that money. I think, if your goal is to reach investors and let them wake up and say 'Wait, there's more than one search engine in the world. Maybe we should buy the stock,' that's a different story. But if you think that putting a billboard up on 38th St. and West Side Highway in New York that says, "The Unabomber Hates the Algorithm" -- I don't get that.
The bigger question, is what would you do if you’re trying to compete with Google? And I think the answer is, you find smaller Dips where you can set up mini-dynasties.
Off the top of my head, I would build the best search engine in the world for high school students. So that if you’re writing a paper on any topic, this search engine will work five times better, and five times faster, than Google – because it will filter out all sorts of extraneous stuff and always give you the right answer when you type in “J. D. Salinger” or “Fidel Castro” or whatever.
If you built that, you could get through that Dip. You could win in the high school homework arena. Why? Because high school students will tell each other about it. And if you do, you’ve just put a hook into an entire generation of millions of people, who, four years from now are going to be in college, and four years after that are going to be starting important jobs.
That's a Dip that's attainable. Whereas the Dip of, 'Well, our algorithm's a little bit better. How do we make a better search engine?' I just don't know how to do that. They may very well be smarter than me, but I don't know how to do that.
