As Its Stock Tops $600, Google Faces Growing Risks By Steve Lohr ..."The great risk to Google is that someday it will face real competition in search," said Jordan Rohan, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets. Google looks so strong today in part because of the stumbles of its principal rivals, Yahoo and Microsoft. Both have invested heavily to catch up in search and online ad auctions, but without success so far. In September, Google's share of Web searches in the United States was 67 percent, up from 54 percent a year earlier, reports Compete.com, a Web analytics firm. The Yahoo share was 19 percent, compared with 29 percent a year earlier. And Microsoft had 9 percent, up slightly from a year ago. The company's market lead is so large that advertisers tailor their technology to work best on Google ad networks, and Web publishers design their sites to best pull in more Google users. Jim Lanzone, chief executive of Ask.com, the fourth-largest search engine with about 4 percent share, sees no "silver bullet" that could greatly shift market share. Ask.com is acknowledged as an innovator in using graphics, audio and video in its results. The search market, he said, is so large that Ask.com can thrive by gradually inching forward. But Silicon Valley start-ups and venture capitalists are betting that there is room for major innovation in search. Powerset and Hakia are two well-financed start-ups working on natural-language search, where a user types a question instead of keywords. Google, too, is apparently pursuing disruptive new search technologies. Narayanan Shivakumar, a computer scientist who heads Google's Seattle office, is being given 100 engineers over the next three years to try to come up with search technology that beats its current offering, according to an industry consultant told of the project. Google's rising market power could also slow it. George F. Colony, chief executive of Forrester Research, was visiting corporate clients across Europe this week. "Nearly every company I meet here, as in the U.S., sees Google as an enemy or a potential enemy," he said from Paris. "That could close doors for Google and make it harder to do deals with potential partners."... Posted at: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/13/technology/13google.html?_r=1&oref=slogin