In the fantastic book Seeing What's Next by Scott Anthony, Erik Roth, and Clayton Christensen, the authors note that market incumbents often utilize an aggregator business model -- they aggregate a number of different services. They are often then disrupted by a specialist company that specializes in just a single offering, and does so well enough to redefine the market so that competition is based on how firms compete in that particular specialty.

When discussing disruptive innovation and Google, this begs the question of whether or not a specialty search firm can disrupt Google. TechCrunch reports on one such search engine, Trulia. Trulia is a real estate search engine. Of course the big problem Trulia and virtually every other search engine will have will be competing with Google for advertiser dollars. Search firms would do well to think of inventive ways of making money that is not on a pay per click basis; asking advertisers for to bid on keywords and pay on a per click basis means the firm in question is competing as directly as possible with Google for ad dollars, and competing head on with an incumbent mammoth such as Google is rarely a successful strategy.

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