As threatening as an Amazon or Barnes and Noble might be, they are probably the smaller worry for Abe and Alibris. What may become their toughest rival is the 2000-pound gorilla of search engines, Google. Google has been a beneficent 2000-pound gorilla. They do not have a predatory reputation like a certain other software company up in Seattle. For years they have simply minded their own business and built a better search engine. Competing in a field of weak and unfocused competitors, they haven’t played hardball. They have simply improved and improved their product, while competitors, trying to convert their technology into cash, have effectively weakened theirs, as they focused on generating income through paid listings rather than better searches. The result is that Google has quietly grown to the point that they control something like 70%-plus of all searches, either through their own site or partners who purchase their results.

If Google is today a gentle giant, two events likely to happen this year may turn this monster more aggressive. The first is an anticipated public offering. Google may be accountable to academic types today, but once it becomes a public company, its shareholders are going to want to see profits. And, they will want to see growth. Google already dominates the search field and search engine advertising. They will probably need to expand their reach to achieve the growth stockholders are likely to demand. Books can be a good source of growth for an internet company, as Amazon can attest. Will Google want to use its searching power to become the web’s premier book finder? I don’t know, but I certainly wouldn’t bet against it.

The other event affecting Google is that they will likely see real competition in the search business for the first time in years. Google has done a magnificent job of burying the likes of Inktomi and Alta Vista (once the most popular search engine), but tomorrow’s competition will likely come from much more formidable sources. Yahoo, which until recently purchased search results from Google, has instead been purchasing search engines as if it collected them. It now owns Inktomi, Alta Vista, All the Web and Overture. They have dropped Google searches. Yahoo appears headed toward combining its purchases to develop a major search engine to go head-to-head with Google. They are one of the very few internet companies with the resources and reach to do so.

And then there’s the Behemoth from the North, Microsoft. They have dumped Look Smart as the primary source for search results for their MSN site, and are presently developing their own search technology. Microsoft is not a gentle competitor. Ask Netscape, once the leader in internet browsers. Microsoft is known as a cutthroat competitor, using its wealth, power, and the fact that the vast majority of computers rely on their software, to capture the markets it desires while annihilating the competition. Some people fear they will do the same with search technology.