Elinor Mills asks in a News.com article: Can there be another Google?
She goes on to say:
Indeed, in such an environment, often the only way to get a seat at the table with the big companies is to introduce a disruptive technology or business model–like Salesforce.com did when it started selling low-cost, on-demand CRM software.
Search is widely believed to be in its infancy. This technology area is going to evolve a lot more and is going to see many changes. Currently we are in the age of keyword box, superficial statistical semantics, stateless systems, text dominance, and archived data. All these factors will be challenged by technology because the nature of data and devices is rapidly evolving beyond text and archived data. On the business model side, Google made advertising successful so now all search companies think like media companies. Surely, there will be a lot more variety in this space because media companies adopted mass market and ignored long tail. The Web uses long tail so new models are likely to emerge.
Does that also mean, however, emergence of new mega companies? The answer will come in the future. It is clear however that for ambitious peope, this does remain a great area to be innovative and both in technology and business models.