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Google Still Ahead In Search Competition
ricst writes "Google is, as we all know, King of the Hill. But Yahoo, MSN and others have come a long ways towards catching up as this International Herald Tribune article describes. The gap between 'best' and 'next best' has narrowed substantially. The good thing is that we all benefit as these guys keep challenging each other."
The important part, do they do no evil?
Because of the quality of it's search engine Google has, over time, became a part of speach. How many times have i heard people say "i just googled for it" or "i found this and that after some googling". Internet search is now associated with google, its the mindset of the vast majority and that is going to be very hard to compete with.
I like Google but the statement is not correct in all domains. Technical searches is getting very hard, as the "sales" sites are crowding out the support pages.
Take a technical part of some kind (graphincs card, disk drive etc.) if you want to get a more detailed description or a technical discussion of a certain problem it is very hard to get to this.
You normally get zillions of sites selling this part first and even "reviews" tend to be blurbs left by a few buyers on the site nothing of real interest.
Help fight continental drift.
I guess you worry about Microsofts monopolistic practises. Guess what: In a couple of years, if things don't change, you'll worry about Google as well.
- Even if Google's not responsible for killing usenet, it sure helped speed up the process.
- Take a look at the cached content feature of Google: In every other context this feature would have been called breach of copyright.
- Take a look at the image search: This too is breach of copyright.
- Look at how people are designing web pages today: The old ideas of crumb trails (navigation paths on top of pages) are coming back, not because users need them but because Google needs them to crawl your site well.
The thing is that the web is adapting to Google now, not the other way round. If you're paranoid you should worry more about Google than about Microsoft because what Google does actually matters.
Caching is *not* a breach of copyright. See "fair use." You can tell Google not to cache the page (via meta tags) if you want.
As for "crumb trails", if a user can follow a link to your site, then Google can too. Google doesn't depend on anything else. You don't have a clue what you're talking about.
Take a look at the image search: This too is breach of copyright.
No, it's not. Google doesn't show (or store) the full-res images; they "quote" the images (an image thumbnail is a reasonable analogy to a quote of text), which is an established "fair use," and they use this quote to provide a link to the original source, just as with their text searches.
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In Korea, long hair is for old people!
People don't try a selection of search engines every day then use whichever's best. They find a search engine they like and stick with it.
The competitors are going to have to be considerably better than Google before people will switch in significant numbers. Or they're going to have to cheat... bundling, anyone?
Look at IE versus other browsers: IE has been behind on features for years, but does it make people switch? No, they use what they're used to.
It would be nice if all the selling stuff could be moved to Froogle, although I'm not sure how technically possible that would be.
It would also be nice if they could get rid of the other 'search' sites that often get the top spots. You click on a link, and just end up on some crummy search site with no actual info.