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"What's missing from search is the context," said Peter Kui at Disney's Go.com.† He added, "You only get that by being part of the entertainment business ... There will be niche search players. Some will come at it from a technology standpoint, but we take the larger view." A technology standpoint offered an insufficiently large view? Should we also be working a Mickey Mouse angle?

AltaVista would face a serious channel-conflict challenge, Upside predicted, because it was peddling its technology to other portals while maintaining a consumer site of its own. Well, at least someone wasn't doing better than we were. Wait. Wasn't that our strategy?

Inktomi, Upside noted approvingly, was "the only major search engine to focus exclusively on providing search technology to other sites." Inktomi had Yahoo as a client. They had AOL. Now they had Microsoft. Despite all that fabulous success, however, Inktomi had lost $2.4 million in their fourth quarter. They had exclusive deals with the three biggest sites on the Internet and were still losing money? That didn't bode well for a company just getting into the business.

Ask Jeeves offered a "natural language" interface they claimed could answer questions written in plain English. They also had a spiffy cartoon butler for a logo and a big marketing budget. I had tested Jeeves and found their branding much better than their search results. Evidently they reached the same conclusion, because they bought the up-and-coming search company Direct Hit in early 2000. Direct Hit was pretty good, though when I asked Larry if it was a threat, he replied, "Any technology can do a good job with a hundred thousand queries a day. It's a lot harder to do it with a hundred million."

Still, good technology combined with strong brand awareness could make Ask Jeeves a search juggernaut. And wasn't it always the butler who turned out to be the bad guy?

Finally, Upside turned to upstart Google, noting, "In terms of pure technology, Google is getting the best reviews."

"Google is a shining example of superior technology actually drawing traffic on the Internet rather than marketing," analyst Danny Sullivan pointed out, explaining why Google had grown to more than ten million searches a day in just over two years.

Not that it would help, Upside opined, since "the company seems to give such short shrift to the more mundane aspects of developing corporate strategy, penetrating new markets, and creating revenue. Nor does anyone in [the] Googleplex have a clear timetable for when Google will turn search technology into profit." Yeah, I was kind of wondering about that myself.

The article's conclusion implied that Ask Jeeves would ultimately pull ahead, because it "has a clear sense of direction and is staking out an important niche [that] has great potential as a tool for customer service." Google, it suggested, might be an acquisition target for AltaVista.

As I finished reading, I realized that I had allowed myself to inhale the air of inevitability settling around our office like a tule fog. People were putting in long hours, our technology clearly worked, and revenue continued to grow. How could things go wrong? Yet, for all the confidence I felt inside the Googleplex, there was a world of doubt outside our doors. Established players had more polished brands, greater market share, and better business strategies. Google's only asset was a reasonably good tool for finding information.

Search, however, would surprise the skeptics. Technology not only mattered; it mattered in a way that was immediately and completely obvious. People searched with a purpose: to find a particular item of information that they needed. A site that obscured its search box behind a wall of links and paid promotions was as useful as a box of crayons for filling in a crossword puzzle. Distracting and fun to play with—but not practical for the task at hand.

Google's founders believed down to their DNA that simplicity was a benefit. They pared Google to its essentials for one reason: as insatiable consumers of