Yebol.com

Did someone finally gather the courage to challenge the web giant?

Yebol.com – A new search engine, whose public beta (testing) version launched on 27th July 2009, is blatantly challenging Google in the search engine sector. It is quoted as “aiming to eliminate the need for refined, secondary, or advanced search steps, as currently required by Google and Yahoo!” (Wikipedia)

This new search engine is built using semantic development and also uses artificial intelligence to pull in data from various encyclopedias, news articles and medical journals to provide the users with more accurate and organized search results.

Ok but what does all this mean? This means that if you search for a term, let’s say, ‘cancer’, on Yebol.com it will not only give you the results generated by other search engines, such as Google, at the centre of the page, but on the right hand side of the page it will also provide you with options such as, ‘causes’ ‘preventions’ ‘treatments’ of cancer from other sources to provide a more accurate solution to your problem.

From a business perspective, this means that in the future, Google may have to share its monopolistic rule of Adwords’ online advertising business that totalled revenue of US$ 21 billion in 2008 (Google.com). Yebol.com is quoted as saying “We see the Future of Search as being very different than today's current Pay-Per-Click dominated structure” (Wikipedia), which means that Google would need to act fast if it wants to maintain its throne (or are they already up to something behind the curtains).

As for me, at the moment, I sometimes only use Yebol.com for generic search terms. Since it is only in its beta (testing) stage, I am not ready to shift my homepage to Yebol.com just yet. Google has done a remarkable job of injecting free softwares such as Adwords, Analytics, Gmail and a bunch of others in my blood and it will take a whole lot more for another search engine to fill in Google’s massive shoes!