The coming SAPI war
If the Web, at least the interesting part of it, is going to look like a huge collection of search engine items, then everyone is going to start building search engines. It's easy to predict a two-tier business model in the future, with major search engines offering API access to their code and data, and a second layer of application developers building cool mashups, remixes, aggregates, whatever, on top of this world wide data base. A major choke point is going to be the Search API (SAPI) used to access this data. It is far too early to tell which API will win, but it is in the adoption of a defacto standard SAPI that the war will be fought.
There is a tradition within the computer trade press to describe such competitive situations as wars. The wide range of military metaphors this provides makes it an obvious choice. Headline writers alone are immensely grateful for its use. We have had spreadsheet wars, and OS wars, and browser wars. Now we can have a search engine war with SAPI as the ammunition.
Search engines have long been tools of individual habit and taste. I use Google, my wife uses Yahoo!. There are toolbar schemes to lock people into one search engine, but users are still able to migrate or use multiple engines of their choosing. If there is a viable business model for an application layer on top of search engines, something still to be proven, then the battle for SAPI lock-in will become brutal, because it will make customer migration or multiple use more difficult. Users won't know, or care, what search engine is running under the hood. To be Web 1.0 about it, SAPI will become the superglue of search engine stickiness.
