Been enjoying Jason Calacanis‘s private email newsletter, at least, when it’s relevant to me as in the Microsoft/Yahoo Search deal, where Jason mentions Fred Wilson‘s opinion that  you can’t beat Google at Search 1.0 - and many companies have tried, and failed.

“….”You need to double down on the right hands and the way Yahoo! was playing the search hand wasn’t going to end in a win for them. I believe that Google has won the “web search version 1.0″ game and the only thing that is left is second place.

Yahoo! and Microsoft essentially agreed to share second place instead of fighting each other for the spoils. We lost a search engine last week but we also gained one. And that’s a promising sign. There are new veins to mine in search and that’s where you want to make your bets these days. You don’t want to compete with Google head on. You want to find a new angle of attack.”

One good thing – there is a version 2.0 and 3.0 of the Search Game – and  Google might NOT win it – it depends on how the cards are played out.

Count on Google to rig the cards as best they can, but they can’t foresee everything –  though they have the biggest repository of knowledge the world has ever seen – their own search engine – they can be taken by surprise as more asutue innovators not making everything searchable (on purpose).

Google’s reliance on Pagerank, it’s dependence on back links (made perfect sence 11 years ago) puts it, in some sense, in the same boat  WebTrends is for Web Analytics – though the comparison is a streach, I admit.  WebTrends was one of the originators of Web Analytics, they got market share early but had a poor interface that was hard to work with, and when new platforms came out, they were able to innovate faster and better than WebTrends because they were not trying to be compatible with their existing base of clients.

WebTrends is still a major force in Web Analytics, one of the leaders, and they’re trying to position themselves as innovators with the Radian6 and Salesforce deals, but at the end they day, they are circumscribed by what they have have built, and limited by it.

In way, Google might have great ideas, like Google Search Wiki, but due to their commanding position in the Web 2.0 Economy, they are constrained in how much they can shake things up before people who make their livelihood on Google and their business partnerships, complain – over every single change Google makes. A smaller, more agile start-up, could, take Google on in Search 2.0 (probable be bought up by Google before had a chance to truly compete) and win, because they don’t have as much invested in the current state of affairs.

I also liked the point about “Google Envy” that Jason brought up:

“….many folks have Google envy and that it’s a distraction:

“I believe that board rooms all over America were heavily distracted by Google’s rise. Envious of Google’s success, many companies wanted to remodel themselves as a Google look-alike.

This affliction was most prominent with the Internet’s four leading non-Google players: Ebay, Yahoo, Amazon, and Microsoft.

For the past 5-10 years, these companies have been distracted from their core mission and focus in life, and more importantly from areas and markets where they actually had a competitive advantage, to try and follow Google (using Google’s playbook).”

Like Fred Wilson said – You can’t beat Google at Search 1.0.   But know this, Google is vulnerable in Search 2.0 and 3.0 much as Microsoft was at the dawn on the Internet as we know it.  Just because Google’s creators are smart, doesn’t mean they are infallible.

A couple of people have taken stabs at guessing what Google’s mistakes though I don’t agree with all of them – here’s someone who has made a list of  top 10 mistakes of Google.