Release the hounds: with search engine competition on the rise, entrepreneurs stand to benefit, as both users and advertisers

Entrepreneur, July, 2004 by Mike Hogan

Who will win? Who cares? You and I for sure, although it's hard to predict where search technology will take us. Like Yogi Berra once explained: "The future ain't what it used to be."

But one thing's for sure: It's going to be an exciting ride.

THE NEXT FRONTIER: Why can I reach across the globe to find every mention of computer faster than I can find a file on the topic on my hard drive? Because the world's disk drives are indexed, and mine aren't--at least they weren't before HotBot's free Desktop (www.hotbot. com/tools/desktop).

Windows deskbars and Internet Explorer toolbars provide handy drop-down lists for quick searches on a dictionary, a thesaurus, RSS news feeds and various sites. HotBOt indexes e-mail and other files on your hard drives as well Considering that Google also wants to index your e-mail, your PC may be the next search frontier.

MIKE HOGAN is Entrepreneur's technology editor. Write to him at mhogan@entrepreneur.com.