SiliconBeat

Given the immense cost of developing search technology, launching a start-up in recent years to challenge Google has seemed a Quixotic quest.

But could Google itself have opened the door to allow another competitor to flourish in the search space?

“Going back to 2000, Highway  101 is littered with the remains of search startups, and on the other hand, you’ve got Microsoft spending spending and losing billions of dollars to try to make inroads,” said Rich Skrenta, who as the CEO of a search start-up trying to challenge the mighty Goog, knows exactly the magnitude of trying to challenge Google in search.

But after seeing well-funded search startups like Cuil go belly up, Skrenta’s startup, Blekko, is increasingly confident its destiny will be different. Blekko has been on a tear in the first few months of 2012, seeing its traffic grow from about 1.6 million monthly visitors in December, to a projected 5.1 million visitors in April.

Blekko monthly visitor totals

“I would say that what we’ve achieved so far is the furthest  any search startup has gotten in 12 years,” Skrenta told me the other day. “Nobody has gotten close to this. It’s sort of a ridculously hard problem.”

To be sustainable, Skrenta says Blekko probably needs to have 10 times the traffic is has now. That means Blekko still has a long way to go. Still, the numbers he posted last week in a company blog represent “a nice jump,” he said.

Skrenta points to a number of possible reasons why more people seem to be using Blekko, which bills itself as the “anti-spam search engine.”

One is promotion. Besides big events like South By Southwest, Blekko has been spreading the word through industry events, and not just at tech shows. Librarians, who Skrenta said love to use Blekko’s “slash tag” filtering system to discover higher quality results, have  been big allies.

“We do every single librarian convention,” Skrenta said. “We take boxes of fliers and the librarians take them back and leave them on the library desks, and that’s been amazingly effective for us.”

But it’s hard not to notice that the  jump in Blekko’s traffic, which was also reported by Search Engine Land, has coincided with Google’s January move to package its search results with content from its Google+ social network - a change Google dubbed “Search Plus Your World.”

Skrenta said he noticed a change between people’s attitudes about the quality of search at this year’s SXSW compared to last year. Last year, people questioned why a startup like Blekko was even necessary. This year, Skrenta said people were much more receptive, because they felt much less satisfied with the quality of their search experience.

It’s simplistic to say Search Plus Your World, which has been reviled in tech circles, is the reason people are moving to Blekko, which weighs its search index according to the authority of sources rather than the traditional method of using links to judge authority, which can allow SEOs to influence search results. If people are growing less satisfied with search, it’s likely more to do with the fact that what turns up in a search result these days is more and more a highly commercialized version of what people would actually like to find.

This is a particular problem with travel and health-related searches, where Blekko often produces a cleaner, less contrived - if less polished - set of results that often feel like the Google of 10 years ago.

One thing that seems certain  is that search, where Google and Bing/Yahoo have  hit a stalemate where Google has about two-thirds of U.S. search traffic, and the Microsoft partnership roughly 30 percent, is going to get a lot more interesting in the next few months.

Facebook is trying to build a decent search engine that would leverage its human connections in a way that Google, even with the Google+ data in Search Plus Your World, would have a difficult time  matching. And if Blekko keeps building its traffic, that could certainly make things more interesting.

Blekko’s growth is not necessarily bad news for Google, which is facing an antitrust probe by the Federal Trade Commission, and would no doubt love to convince regulators in the U.S. and Europe that it  is not an overly dominant monopolist.

I couldn’t help but notice that none other than a Google spokesman in Washington tweeted the Search Engine Land post about Blekko’s growth. Who knows? Perhaps the FTC will start using Blekko too.

As Silicon Valley’s patent war continues to rage, a federal judge has ordered Apple CEO Tim Cook and Samsung CEO Gee-sung Choi to a face-to-face mediation session  to try to settle their differences over smartphone technology.

Federal Judge Lucy Koh, in an order filed in San Jose Federal District Court Tuesday, gave the two companies a 90-day deadline to appear at a settlement conference with Magistrate Judge Joseph Spero.

“As the parties have indicated in their joint statement, the chief executive officer and general counsel of Apple and the chief executive officer and general counsel of Samsung shall appear and participate at the MJSC,” Koh’s order states.

While the lawsuit between Apple v Samsung doesn’t focus on Google, Apple’s action against the Korean smartphone manufacturer is widely seen as a proxy war against Google’s Android mobile operating system, which Google essentially gives away to phone manufacturers like Samsung, HTC and Motorola - a direct affront to Apple’s business model.

Google indirectly profits from Android through searches made from Android devices, as well as content sold through its Google Play store for those tablets and phones. But more importantly, Android is Google’s beachhead in an Internet that is increasingly going mobile.

A similar judicial tete-a-tete last year between Google CEO Larry Page and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison over Android failed to prevent Oracle’s suit against Google from going to trial. (Festivities kicked off Monday in Google v Oracle trial in a federal courtroom in San Francisco, and continued Tuesday as Ellison took the stand and said Oracle had considered buying Blackberry Maker Research in Motion or Palm, and even building its own Java phone).

Given Steve Jobs’ famous oath to destroy Android, it’s hard to know whether Tim Cook would be more conciliatory than the late Apple demi-god.

Google “ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off. Grand theft,” Jobs famously swore in Walter Isaccson’s biography. “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go to thermonuclear war on this.”

It will be interested to see whether Judge Koh’s attempt at reconciliation can ward of mutually assured destruction.

Since it was launched in 2008, Google’s Chrome browser has been steadily gaining share against Mozilla’s Firefox and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. And for one day last week, Sunday March 18, Chrome was the most used browser in the world, according to newly released stats.

The Wednesday announcement of Chrome’s brief rise to No. 1 last Sunday was made by Irish metrics firm StatCounter.

While it’s only a one-day event, “this is a milestone,” Aodhan Cullen, the CEO of StatCounter, said in an interview. Chrome still faces a tough battle to unseat its main rivals,  including IE and Firefox, in many regions of the world. Chrome remains in an often distant 2nd or 3rd place in China, the U.S., and Germany.

“The long term trend  has certainly been for Chrome gaining market share, but there is no guarantee it’s going to become the No. 1 browser,” Cullen said.

Cullen declined to predict when the switch might come, but StatCounter’s own numbers say Chrome is gaining an average of about 2 percentage points a  month on IE, over the past year. That means at its current rate of growth, Chrome would become the world’s top browser sometime in the June to July period.

There also is a great deal of uncertainty about such measurements. They are based on a relatively small sample of total web use (15 billion page views per month, including 4 billion from the US), and there is also a dispute about methodology.

But one fascinating trend unearthed by StatCounter was the surge in use Chrome gets on weekends, and the corresponding drop in the use of Internet Explorer, when people are apparently not sitting at their office computers and have more freedom to choose their browser.

While the useage of Firefox, Opera and Apple’s Safari browser don’t fluctuate much between weekdays and weekends, there is a huge ebb and flow between IE and Chrome, suggesting that people are switching between Microsoft weekdays and Google weekends.

“That’s really interesting,” Cullen said in an interview. “It’s just an indication  that when people have the choice at home, they are using Chrome, and when the go back to work, and your browser choice is indicated by company policy, people are using Microsoft.”

“Whether Chrome can take the lead in the browser wars in the long term remains to be seen, however the trend towards Chrome useage at weekends is undeniable. At weekends, when people are free to choose what browser to use, many of them are selecting Chrome in preference to IE,”  Cullen said.

The movement to Chrome is of  under appreciated significance for Google, because Chrome is the keystone of its cloud-based strategy. It’s also significant for Google’s revenue picture, because Google does not have to pay search advertising Traffic Acquisition Costs to Mozilla, Apple or other browser-makers for searches made from Chrome browsers.

I’ll miss Craig Silverstein, Google’s first employee, who confirmed to me Thursday that he’s leaving Google to work for the educational beacon Khan Academy. He was always a great interview, had a great sense of humor, and seemed to be one of the relatively few people left at Google who felt free to say what he really thought about the place, on the record, warts and all, even when it came to CEO Larry Page.

He confirmed his departure in a typically irreverent email to me a few hours ago, saying:

“You’ve pretty much covered it.  It’s hard to leave Google after so
long, but I’m excited by the opportunities at Khan.  I don’t know
exactly what I’ll be doing at Khan — programming of some sort — but
I’m sure I’ll find out more next week. :-)”

A few weeks ago, I went to the Googleplex for an interview with Craig about the culture of the company, which had just been selected as the best place to work in America. Craig video-conferenced in from New York, and walked into the interview carrying a lumpy object. “Can you tell what this is?” he said, holding it out. It was bread that Craig had just baked, which he proceeded to bite into with gusto.

Craig said that he’d started baking bread at Google in the earliest days, all the way back to when Google was in Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park. There were no good stores nearby, and Page, Silverstein and co-founder Sergey Brin didn’t want to bike or drive all the way to downtown Palo Alto, so Craig started baking bread.

Over time, Craig said, it became an important symbol of Google’s culture - not because people like fresh bread, they do - but because it was something other companies just did not do. It was a marker of Google’s uniqueness.

I can’t help but think that part of that Googley uniqueness is headed out the door with Craig’s departure.

Here’s a link to the interview I did with Craig in 2010: http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_16291970

Facebook has topped Google’s Orkut to become the top social network in Brazil, the world’s fifth largest country and Internet market, comScore will announce later today. That’s a huge win for Facebook, because Brazil for years has been a stronghold of Google’s Orkut social network.

The switch reflects Facebook’s rapid growth in much of the developing world, particularly in South America and Asia, countries that are now providing the lion’s share of Facebook’s growth, with membership approaching the saturation point in countries like the U.S. and Britain.

Here’s my story on that topic:  http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_19723521

comScores said that in December 2011, Facebook.com attracted 36.1 million visitors, a 192 percent jump in traffic over the previous  twelve months, meaning it passed Orkut, even though  – to surpass Orkut as the leading social networking destination in the market.

In an early view of the release later today, comScore said:

“Facebook’s rapid ascent in the Brazilian market has certainly been one of the most interesting stories to develop during the course of 2011,” said Alex Banks, comScore managing director for Brazil. “Brazil has always been a particularly social market and currently owns the fifth largest social networking population in the world. But despite the cultural affinity for social media, Facebook adoption had traditionally lagged in the market. That has all changed in the past year, during which the site has tripled in audience size as engagement has grown sevenfold to assume the leadership position in the market.”

- Mike Swift

Twitter clearly views Google’s new social search features, which highlights postings by the searcher’s Google+ friend connections, as a direct threat to its bread and butter - - serving as the default place on the Web where people go to learn about breaking news, whether it comes from an individual or a news organization.

Tuesday, within hours after Google announced its new “Search - Plus your World” service, Twitter complained in a written statement released to the media that:

Search example from Twitter general counsel, Alex Macgillivray

Macgillivary’s Tweet linked to an example of a Google search. He is saying, essentially, is that a person searching  Google for “@wwe”, the Twitter account of the professional wrestling organization, will instead now be steered to Google+ content.  The Twitter account result was there, but it was well down the page.

It will be interesting to see watch whether Twitter takes things to the next level and files a formal complaint with the FTC. Twitter spokesman Matt Graves declined to comment Wednesday afternoon.