IQ News: Search for Tomorrow - Search engines are on the lookout for new identities.

As competition among online companies grows fiercer, many of them have confronted their identity crises by affixing new labels onto what they do. The steady public relations drone elicits such declarations as, “We’re not a software company, we’re a media company” or “We’re not a media company, we’re a technology back-end provider.” And no one is struggling more than competitors in the search-engine category to redefine themselves.
Despite their heavy traffic, search engines have often been viewed as way stations at which users pause briefly before going elsewhere.