In a previous
article, we explained that the pivot of the internet is shifting from search to
social interactions. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that search is losing its value.
After all, don’t we still live with previous paradigms like single sign-on and
e-commerce? Search is still a crucial paradigm and so all the Internet bigcos continue
fighting for position – and some of them ultimately aim to usurp the search leader,
Google. In this article, we take a closer look at the competitive advantages of Google
Search and try to find out whether Google is really beatable.
Google’s Competitive Advantages
1. Free SEO Labor
Google’s work force is not limited to their PhDs and 15,000 talented employees in
Mountain View, New York and Dublin. SEOs from all around the world can be considered a
free labor force for Google. In order to get their sites promoted on the world’s number
one search engine, SEOs optimize their sites according to Google’s rules, register their
sitemaps and ping Google’s services whenever a new page is created. This gives Google a
huge advantage over the other search engines, because other engines don’t have the same
level of feedback. Google caters to this crowd very well too, because it offers SEO
friendly tools and advise.
2. Extra data – Google Co-op, Image Labeler, etc
With its customized search service, Google Co-op,
users don’t only create vertical a search engine – they also give Google very valuable
domain-specific information.
Also, by tagging images on Image
Labeler and Picasa, you help perfect Google’s
Image Search.
3. Google knows everything about your site
Google made a very smart acquisition back in 2004. They bought Urchin and converted it
to a free traffic analysis add-on for your site, Google Analytics. Today many sites
use it to get a better understanding of their traffic. But a side effect of this tool is
that it potentially gives Google access to important data about your site. Indeed if all
sites had Urchin installed, Google would no longer need to compute pageranks, as it would
have the most accurate access to site popularity possible! Obviously not all sites use
Google Analytics, but still it is not an insignificant amount that do.
The recently acquiredFeedBurner also serves the same purpose. It’s not
only a great advertising channel for Google, but yet another way of measuring site
popularity.
4. Google knows a lot about you – Personalization
Gmail, Google Toolbar, Google Docs and others. They all give clues about your
personality, your interests, likes and dislikes. Consequently, you end up with more
personalized search results. For example: if you are the type of person who searches
for programming info in Google Search, discuss KDE’s latest bugs on GTalk and Gmail,
visit Freshmeat and Sourceforge all day and long with your Google Toolbar-powered Firefox
— well then Google will not consider your Python, Tomcat, Apache queries as zoological,
but programming related 🙂
5. Google offers UNIVERSAL search
Google does not only crawl the Web, blogosphere, press releases and books. It also
crawls the real world with Google Earth. And Google Map’s Street View lets you drive
around big cities like New York and San Francisco, from your browser. Now with
Universal Search, you can reach all of these services with a simple Google
search.
6. Google has psychological dominance
The fact that Google is such a widely discussed topic makes you think that it is
indispensable. Psychologically, you feel that you lack it when you try other search
engines. Especially if your query is indefinitely motivated – e.g your purpose is
more about researching than finding – then you always want to try your search on Google
as well, even if you were already satisfied with other results elsewhere.
7. Google is everywhere
OK, let’s say you decided to switch search engines. You still have obstacles, such
as:
- If you use one of the Google network services, like Gmail, you always have Google top
of mind; - If you go to CNN.com, you have
Google in the toolbar (on the US version at least); so why bother with entering a new
URL for search? - If you use Firefox, Safari or Opera, then Google is your default search provider,
home page and feed subscriber.
I could go on, but the point is – there’s no
escape from Google. This is not merely the success of algorithms, but also the
success of Omid Kordestani and the whole business development team.
8. Google has looooooots of ca$h
As of today, Google’s market valuation is more than $150 Billion. They have lots of
cash reserves (although not as much as Microsoft) and their profit margins are very high.
In other words, Google is financially very healthy and they have the power to snap up any
innovation developed externally. Just as they did with FeedBurner, Kaltix and Urchin.
Competitive Landscape
In summary, competition in the search arena is not limited to algorithms only. You
have a lot of obstacles before you can take on Google.
The real question is: does this all mean that Google is unbeatable in terms of market
share? Even though Microsoft’s Don Dodge said
that even a 1% share in search market is very valuable, the fact is that Google dominates
search. And that dominance brings monopoly and privacy issues to the fore.
I don’t think Google is unbeatable (although you may think I’m completely biased, as I
work for Hakia!). Google can be beat. On the algorithm side we are seeing intensive
semantic methods emerge, which may in time challenge statistical methods like pagerank.
But even outside the algorithm, bigcos continue to fight Google – especially Microsoft,
which has the necessary cash and single sign-on power to potentially win the search
space.
Moreover, vertical search engines may come to the rescue in solving most of the domain
specific problems. In the same way, innovations in user interface and
other areas continue to flourish.
Conclusion
Beating conventional wisdom is not so unusual. Commodore, Lotus, AOL are examples of
previously dominant tech companies that eventually fell by the wayside. So even though
Google looks very strong and rock solid to many of us, it can be beat. But it will take
more than technology and marketing alone, because as the above points show – Google is
strong in a lot of different ways.
Disclosure: Emre Sokullu works for Hakia, an alternative search engine to
Google
