Start-ups try to challenge Google, at least on mobile search

Europe's competition regulator filed antitrust charges against Google on the belief that the company's search business had become so powerful that it was pretty much impossible to compete with. But do not tell that to Bobby Lo.

Lo is the founder of Vurb, a start-up in San Francisco's bustling downtown that has a new kind of search engine meant for mobile phones. The idea is to take several common queries - restaurants, movies - and group them into snippets of information and apps for related actions.

Lo is one of a growing number of entrepreneurs who are betting that the rise of mobile phones has created an opportunity to do something that once seemed unthinkable: to challenge Google in search.

After a decade in which entrepreneurs and investors steered clear of Google's home turf, venture capitalists have plowed hundreds of millions of dollars into dozens of search start-ups because they say they believe the Internet giant cannot dominate search on mobile devices the way it has on personal computers.

"There has been no great solution for mobile search," Lo said.

Venture capitalists financed 27 search companies in 2014 and 33 the year before - the two most active years on record, according to CB Insights, whose data on the venture capital industry goes back to 1999. The biggest jump has been in mobile search companies, according to a report CB Insights released in March, particularly companies that use "deep links" to connect mobile applications the way websites are linked on the web.

Search is still a tiny start-up category, especially compared with red-hot services like ride-hailing or grocery delivery. "But as the spate of early-stage investments in mobile search matures, the area could see funding totals increase as well as the entrance of more start-ups," CB Insights said in its report.

Each of these search companies has a slightly different take. Quixey, which has raised $135 million in venture capital, according to CB Insights, features a traditional-looking search box that helps people find information inside apps, as well as functions, such as a button to order a cab.

A company named URX is trying to link apps so that people can perform related actions by hopping between them. Other ideas include putting search inside mobile messaging systems or creating new home-screen applications that use past behaviour to predict what a user might want next - a concept Google has invested in already.

"If you ask 100 people whether search is broken or not, 99 would say Google is perfect, it's everything I need," said John Lilly, a partner at Greylock Partners, which has backed a search start-up called Jack Mobile. "But if you ask them, 'How are you going to figure out what you want to watch on TV tonight or where are you going to dinner?' they would say Google wouldn't know that, that's not search."

So while people do not think search is broken, it can be improved, Lilly said.

©2015 The New York Times News Service