Jeff Jarvis searches for a new search engine.

Question: Is there a Google Killer out there?

Jeff Jarvis: I don’t see anything on the horizon that can stop Google. And that’s our own fault in the industry because we’ve just really let Google have everything.

In the ad industry we’ve said, okay, they have almost half the ad industry now online. They’ve taken over search not because they’re evil or nefarious but because they’re damned good.

The only water to the witch of Google that I can see is openness. Google is not fully open, it is opaque. And so if you look at Google’s response to Facebook, and its sudden dominance of the new “Friend” market, they responded by trying to create with others an open standard for friend relationships online.

And I think that the response to Google would be not another company but an open network. So I argue, for instance, that we should have an open ad network out there that is more transparent than Google’s, that provides some competition to Google and that provides more real value in the market place.

Unfortunately the rest of the industry just doesn’t have its act together. They don’t know how to cooperate and so Google will only grow bigger and bigger and bigger.

Recorded on: April 30, 2008