Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Inertia is a powerful thing, people tend to not change services unless the one they are using has serious flaws, or a new one with a "must have" feature shows up.
Unless someone comes up with a revolutionary feature for search engines, Google won't be losing terrain any time soon.
Fabio Aquotte
It may actually be that anyone has yet to best any technology offerings Google has, hence nobody is able to challenge their dominance. Apart from that, Google is hardly a monopoly. You have a wide selection of search engines and nobody is forcing you to use any of them over the other.
Join Tor today!
Google have won this round of the search engine game. As far as keyword search goes, there is no reason for me to switch. They're free, they're fast, they almost always get the info I'm looking for in the first couple of links. There is simply no incentive to change. Unless google feck up (start to support wars/slavery so it becomes political, add one feature too many, finally stop with the search results and just returns ads)
However, its not sewn up. What I really want is a search engine that actually understands what I'm asking for. Rather than a library index, what I want is a librarian. The company that get that right will be the overal winners... but thats decades away - and I imagine it will come from left field, just like Google did.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
I dont think so. Google operates in a field where the switching cost to the user is zero. If GOOG does not deliver, it is extremely easy for the user to switch to a competing search engine. So I dont feel threatened by GOOG. But MSFT monopoly was created by increasing the switching cost to the user. It realized long before its customers, the key to revenue is lock them in. MSFT effectively confused interoperability with IBM-PC compatibility and later Windows compatibility and got bulk of the users locked in. As long as it prices its products, mainly MS Office a tad less than what it would cost the corporations to switch t a competing product they will keep raking money in. And they use the money to make sure that the playing field does not get leveled ever again.
So GOOG can keep its only if it constantly innovates and provides a better service than its competitor. As long as there is competitive pressure on a company, I dont begrudge any billions they rake in. But I strongly resent even pennies made by unfair companies that do not have the burden of competition. Cable monopolies, electicity utilities, MSFT, teacher unions, anyone who found a way to dodge the pressure of competition irks me. Because I am under so much pressure to constantly learn and fight off competitors 20 years younger than me who are gunning for my job.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Google is, generally, the best search engine for English, and it's normalization is quite good -- i.e. widening the search to include plurals or singulars, recognize words that might need accent marks, and so on.
But frankly, Google and Pagerank suck when it comes to searching in languages like Japanese. I can search for a Japanese company or item and get two pages of completely irrelevant links first. Not spam links, but junk like blog posts. Normalization sucks; Japanese uses a mixed script (phonetic kana plus Chinese characters), and Google does no conversion or normalization when searching. It would be a cinch for anyone to top Google in the huge Japanese market, and I think they're already getting pummelled by Chinese search engine.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
Back before there was a Google, my nephew got in trouble for bringing up the googol in math class. My father told him about googol. The teacher told him he was making it up and gave him detention. Ah, the perils of the New Jersey public education system.
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."