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Gap Between Google and Competition Widening
eldavojohn writes "Business Week has up an article trying to explain why it is getting harder and harder to 'catch' Google in the search engine game. We've heard of many different kinds of search engines and many different companies entering the market but: '... Google keeps gaining share in the face of newly launched capabilities on other engines. In August, Google sites gained 6.8 percentage points of search share from a year earlier, according to researcher comScore Media Metrix. Meantime, Yahoo lost 1 percentage point, Microsoft's sites lost 3.3 percentage points, and Ask.com lost one-half of a percentage point.' All of this on the heels of recent news that A9 scaled back its features. Is it possible to think of a number better than a one with a hundred zeros behind it?"
It's odd that people should say Google are widening the gap... Google's certainly the best, but lately I've been noticing a lot more search results that lead to pages that don't load, or result in 404s (in fact, a domain I used to run 3 years ago is still in Google's index).
Is google not removing ages from their index to try and seem impressive, or getting lax with recrawling sites? Or am I the only one noticing this?
Global symbol "$deity" requires explicit package name at line 2. - If only $scripture started "use strict;"
Look at the way great ideas have grown quickly: YouTube, digg, and so on.
And you can bet that if someone came up with a radically new search algorithm that provided noticeably better search results than Google (which is actually falling a bit behind, which is a dangerous mistake...) you can believe that most people would quickly migrate to their new engine of choice. (Of course, if it had little to no ads, speedy and reliable service, etc...)
...I have to say this is great news but not wholly unexpected. If you provide a very useful service for free, then you deserve to be at the top of the heap. There's no competing with free unless you're, oh how should we put this... BETTER.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Where did my 5 moderator points go?
The parent should have been modded "Informative."
Why the -1? Sheesh.
Information is not a bad thing" (tm)
Sadly, in the US, a disproportionate number of people can not identify The United States on a map!
What makes one think that they know that "google" is not "googol" as the parent tried to differentiate?
Hell, I'd be willing to guess that a full 80% or more don't know that a 1 with 100 zeroes is a googol.
Windows is not the answer.
Windows is the question.
The answer is "NO."
I like Altavista's actual search mechanism better (it is more precise, and makes sure that the returned pages contain the information I look for without having to place Google's annoying required) "inanchor" tag. However, sites like Altavista and others don't have anywhere near as many pages as Google. Also, the UI/interface/look on all of the other sites really sucks compared to Google.
Where were you when the voynix came?
I find that Google is becoming less and less useful.
...?
The web now has become so large that a simple keyword search just doesn't cut it anymore. Try searching for information about a popular digital camera from someone who isn't trying to sell them. It is next to impossible. (Yes I know about http://www.givemebackmygoogle.com/ - a good try, but not really addressing the fundamental problem.)
The best way that search could get better in my opinion is to introduce some kind of filtering on the type of organisation that produces the pages you are searching for. Google already does a bit of this with Google Scholar. But we need something far more general, and more to the point, a facility for excluding results of particular types, e.g. blogs, sites trying to sell something,
I know that some people will complain that it may be a very subjective judgement whether site X is commercial or not. But search results are never going to be perfect anyway. Let's have the improvements where they are available, and worry about the corner cases later.
and, say, Clusty.com, except that the latter doesn't collaborate with the Chinese Communist Party.
It seems that if you cant catch them, you take shots at them to change peoples view, or you try to change the rules to make it harder for them to succeed. We are seeing this with the threat of a non-neutral Internet where most proponents nearly always use Google as the example.
I think the shots at Google are a little bit of 'tall poppy syndrome' kicking in. The only thing keeping Google from being resented is their 'humility' - that they aren't flaunting their position and their committed to 'not be evil' - like not handing the info to the NSA without a warrant like the 'others' did.
I bet there is a correlation between the switching rate from IE to Firefox. It having google as prime search engine makes up for a lot of searches.
No, successs and being the best isn't wrong. Using your success and money to oppress others through unethical business practices is. There is a huge difference. Staying on top because you have a great product is one thing. Staying on top because you can quash others unfairly is another.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
In general the main cause is the bigger search engines are still not even trying to copy the big selling points of google.
Their front pages are still a big abortion of pictures and junk. Google is simple "box + logo".
Their results are trying to coppy google but the no.1 thing the google results page sells is TRUST. Most people trust google that all adds are going to be labeled clearly and they will not be inserted into the results!
MSN/Yahoo/etc already missed the boat on this issue. If anyone is going to compete with Google it's going to have to be someone new at this point probably. Unless of course someone thinks up a new must have feature.
I think among the tech crowd, it's a given that companies who cut back on R&D are simply shooting themselves in the foot. Google is all about R&D and trying out new ideas. The amoebic growth and success of everything "Google" should be more than just noticed by various companies... it should be mimicked.
Instead, we still see a whole lot of "heads in the sand" and people wondering why their previously successful business models are failing. But then again I can see where people are trying to demonstrate that they learned something from the dot-com failures too... but perhaps they didn't learn what they should have since a great deal of the mentality from the dot-com boom is present in Google's "just try it" ideology.
Compare http://www.google.com/ to http://www.lycos.com./ Google realized early on that to win in the searching business, all you need to do is search really well. As long as I still have to scroll my browser page to see everything on a search site's front page, that search site is too complicated. Having a simple main page lets users set it to their home page with negligible impact to their browser's startup time; that really matters more than some people think.
AltaVista got the message, but they're still playing catch-up.
Take care,
Mark
There is a solution...
In the past six months, I've noticed two computer newb friends of mine doing the same exact thing-- When provided a URL for a website, they don't know they can type it into the browser's URL field. Instead, they use their bookmark for google (it's also set as their home page) and then type the URL into the google search field. In most instances, Google returns a link to the URL they have just typed.
In the most recent instance, it didn't because it was a website I had just created for my friend. He told me on the phone that he couldn't find the website I had sent him the URL for. I knew the domain was propagated in DNS, so this sounded odd to me. Then when I visited him at his house, I saw him typing it into google instead of the browser's URL field and I had to explain that google didn't yet know about the website and that he needed to request it directly.
The other guy opens his browser, which has google set as his home page, then he types "www.hotmail.com" into the search field so he can check his email.
So, yeah, Google has established itself as a fundamental component of the internet for many, many people.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
That sounds like a kind of Silicon Valley syndrome. All of these things you say about cool stuff and the brightest minds have been true of the old Apple that nearly died, of Silicon Graphics which has finally died, of Sun which is floundering, and the list goes on. Data General anyone? WANG? On top of that they are now victims of their own success. Having acheived so much they are now in the position of being essentialy monopolistic thug capitalists. Other search engines and portals and ad services are not keeping up, so even without intention they become the New Microsoft. Google is a very strong company indeed, but in that market strength can ironically be a huge weakness and even the very strongest tend to last only so long before the entire market changes.