It may not be the last great business model, but Google has proved that search linked to advertising is a very large and lucrative business, and everyone— including Ms Dyson, who invested a small sum in Powerset— seems to want a piece of it.

Since the beginning of 2004, venture capitalists have put nearly $350 million into no fewer than 79 start-ups that had something to do with Internet search, according to the National Venture Capital Association, an industry group.

In some ways, the willingness of so many to make multimillion-dollar investments to take on Google and other search companies represents a startling change. In the late 1990s, when Microsoft dominated the technology world, inventors and investors did everything they could to avoid competing with the software company.

Yet many of today’s search start-ups say that Google’s dominance today is different from Microsoft’s in the late 90s when its operating system was a virtual monopoly and nearly impossible to break. In the Internet search industry, “you earn your right to be in business every day, page view after page view, click after click,” said Barney Pell, a founder and the chief executive of Powerset, whose search service is not yet available.

But at the same time, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have thousands of engineers, including some of the world’s top search specialists, working on improving their search results. And they have spent billions building vast computer networks so they can respond instantly to the endless stream of queries from around the world.

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