The VC Perspective: Roger McNamee on Search

Roger McNamee, venture capitalist behind great success stories like Electronic Arts and Intuit, blogs about the importance of search to the computer industry:

"Wall Street has generally viewed search as a single opportunity, but it’s more complicated than that...the largest and best known are the index model, which is the core of Google’s offering, and the yellow pages model, which was originally developed by the Overture division of Yahoo.  Relationship search has also become an important category, led by Match.com...thanks to Google Desktop Search, a new category is emerging, which searches the bits on hard drives, networks, and the internet irrespective of file type and location. I suspect there are many other modes of search with commercial potential."

This echoes last year's Web 2.0, when Kleiner Perkin VC John Doerr described six different Web types, each of which might have its own killer search application. I think even John's grand vision understates the market opportunity. What is a magazine or a mall other than a search mechanism? Indeed, what is a marketplace other than a mechanism by which buyers discover sellers?