The most interesting question is: Is Google adjusting their search results to optimize ad revenue?
You know your site (Stack Overflow) is succeeding when it is used as a verb in reference to search. You’re right up there with Google.
For instance, today I see Leon Bambrick (secretGeek) write: … I investigate. Dead end. I google it. … (Google as a verb.) He goes on to write: Get more info. Investigate that. Dead end. Google it. Dead end. Stack overflow it: dead end.
Another question is how does the monopoly respond to threats to it’s dominance?
Sun Microsystems is IMO a good example here:
http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/what_we_did
Is Google’s monopoly such a surprise. The hidden fact about extremely successful tech companies (IE Microsoft) is its developers. Microsoft created a massively successful company pre-millennium and therefore gained many of the greatest minds in programming but Gates was also known to drive his programmers like slaves and treated them like crap.
Post-Millennium enter Google. They have awesome facilities, pay their programmers really well, create a great working environment for programmers to interact and share ideas. Not to mention that Google is based on sound principles. If I just graduated from MIT top of my class and I had offers from both Google and Microsoft where would I go… It’s a no-brainer. As long as Google doesn’t let their business be taken over by suits who want to corrupt their business model in favor of numbers on a spreadsheet, don’t expect them to lose their position anytime in the next decade or more.
That top tier of the most talented and driven programmers is to technology companies what the silent majority is to elections. Nobody knows exactly what influences/drives their actions (except Google) but whatever side they join inevitably wins.
Microsoft had it but they’re business model is morally bankrupt. Gates is not the reason Microsoft was so successful, their programmers and their ability to gobble up competing companies (and their talent) is.
That’s why everybody but Microsoft who follows Microsoft’s business model fails and it seems like the Google founders discovered a bag of magical pixie dust on the pot of leprechaun’s gold at the end of the rainbow.
You can’t hate the good guy who made the world a better place, but you can’t help but to suspect him because in the real business world, he isn’t supposed to win.
As long as Google doesn’t let their business be taken over by suits who want to corrupt their business model in favor of numbers on a spreadsheet, don’t expect them to lose their position anytime in the next decade or more.
Yep, I know about the short-termism of Wall Street that causes this.
While it is not the only source of problems, now you see why Google decided to IPO using dual class stock to prevent this from happening.
Microsoft had it but they’re business model is morally bankrupt.
Yep, unfortunately MS copied some of IBM’s business strategies, such as FUD, and vendor lock-in. I think Ballmer is responsible for most of this copying. Compare with Sun Microsystems, which did the right thing (see my link to Schwartz’s blog post above).
Part of the traffic data are demographic. As Jeff pointed out, a site geared toward programmers gets 350 times more traffic from google that any other search engine. I don’t know to many (any actually) that search with Yahoo or MS Live. I do work wit a website that has a decidedly different domestic demographic and it receives a vast majority of it’s incoming search traffic from MS Live.
I used to do residential computer repair and would estimate 30% of these folks did not know how to change their home page and, therefore, had MSN as the first thing they see when they get on the internet. While I do agree that Google does represent a majority of search engine traffic, we do need some perspective when discussing such things.
Do you know what is really frightening?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4645596.stm
That Google admits in public that they are helping a totalitarian government brainwash 1/6 of the world’s population and noone gives a damn about it.
Are you sure its that high of a percent? What timeline’s your __utmz set to?
http://twitter.com/mildweed/status/2178655165
I want Google to have a monopoly. There’s a reason people use it. They do things right.
Alex on February 9, 2009 10:23 AM
My site was sandboxed by Google for our political content. Overnight we vanished off the internet map, as if we had never existed.
Today I was talking to a major supplier for my business, and he said it’s been well known Google will sandbox or sideline sites with a perceived anti-obama bias. That’s astounding to me, and scary
I would not believed it had it not happened to me, but after posting one admittedly thought provoking article unflatering to the president, which was getting plenty of hits and attempts at malicious spam comments (which we blocked) we suddenly fell off the google radar.
Our readership went from 500 visits a day to less than 10 within 3 days. When I look at my stats in SiteMeter I want to cry. It looks like a cliff dive, and we changed nothing about what we do or how we post.
If we had been depending on that traffic to sell ads, we would be sunk, and many more conservative websites have been.
I too thought there was nothing wrong with Google’s virtual monopoloy, because I assumed they were clean and fair…LOL. Sure, just the way Fox news is ‘fair and balanced’ it turns out.
It is extremely dangerous to have something as essential as an internet search engine be dominated by a company willing to use their position to exercise their pollitical points of view and police free speech.
After it happened to me, I realized they don’t even need to shut you down…they just need to make you invisible, like pulling the card for a book out of a library’s catalogue drawer, but leaving the book on the shelf. You get to claim the book is still available, although no one would think to search for it, or have any idea where it was located.
I cannot understand how individuals who were aghast at George Bush’s moves to silence free speech, tacitly condone this kind of behavior because it’s “right” and being done by their side.
I’m not a professional analyst, and my approach here is pretty back-of-the-napkin. Still, it confirms what those of us in the search industry have known for a long time.
Probably because Google isn’t out there badmouthing their competitors, litigating former customers and registering bogus patents.
On top of that, there are zero lock in effects in the search markets. I could switch search engine, or my browser could do it for me, and I would be none the wiser.
It is an important difference.
Data portability in web apps, however, is a another story alogother. Market dominance there would be a potential problem.
the next frontier is local mobile search, which nobody has quite worked out yet. except the only way for someone other than Google to win is to call it something other than search. Microsoft has a chance if they call it Explore since they already own that word in a marketing sense…
otherwise, when someone thinks search, it’s Google-- hell, they usually say Google! as long as Google keeps giving us the page we want in the top 1,2,3 results, how could that mindset possibly change?
I can tell you exactly why Google doesn’t get the angry mobs that Microsoft got. It’s because the freetards don’t have a vastly inferior open-source product to tout as an alternative while claiming to be the victims of unfair business practices.
Google search is a middle man. And it turns out to be very easy to cut out the middle man if he fails to connect users to providers. In fact, pre-Google most people cut out the middle man by using browser bookmarks. Post-Google, I stopped using the bookmark feature of browsers because it’s easier and more portable to type a keyword into Google. Modern browsers automatically do the lookup for you. So instead of a stackoverflow.com bookmark, I just type stack overflow in a search box and get transported to the site automatically. I don’t even need to stop at a search page and see the ads anymore. If Google ever made itself undesirable (by making stackoverflow.com disappear, for instance), I’d change or cut out the middle man. Google could lose its search monopoly over night.
The point to start worrying about Google’s power will come when it develops products that become monopolies themselves. For instance if 50% of email addresses ended in gmail.com, we might have problems. In those cases, Google is a provider of a service, not a middle man. That’s why Wikipedia is a more troubling monopoly in my opinion.
Google made me change my website to render in their monopoly browser. To get emails from the GMail system, I had to install gExchange, which forced me to install gAD (and join the Google forest), which forced me to change the DNS servers. Now Google says I should ditch XHTML/CSS and use some gLight thing.
Does the fact that Google’s products are mostly free and ad-supported somehow exempt it from the same scrutiny?
After much consideration, Mr. Atwood, yes, in fact does. In my book, if the guy running the show is consistently giving me outstanding software that legitimately improves the quality of my life, for free, then why the hell wouldn’t I want him dominating the market?
My point is that a monopoly is dangerous stuff, no matter how or why it came about.
Fine. But you must see that the danger of a Google monopoly is totally different from the danger of the Microsoft monopoly. Google is the fourth search engine I’ve used as a default. (Preceded by Yahoo directory, Web Crawler, and Alta Vista.) It wasn’t that hard to switch. All the desktop machines I’ve ever used have run some version of a Microsoft OS. I’d love to switch to something else, but it ain’t gonna happen soon.
Honestly, Google gets me answers to my questions as quickly as I’m able to type them in. And it seems to have very efficiently routed traffic to Stack Overflow. How is that a bad thing?
I would say very similar situation applied for many many other websites. Google is the best source of both organic and paid traffic. I’m using Yahoo and find their search results quite accurate, as good as Google’s but I guess nobody cares about the search engine war now. Search means Google and googling means searching. It is disturbing and they’re the biggest brother.
I agree with Max, Google has many great products and the best thing is most of them are free. I find them better than paid alternatives sometimes. Besides, They don’t trouble us advertising much as yahoo and MSN does.
So, i don’ think these results are innaccurate, i didn’t use any other search besides Google (except for when it comes to torrents :D). So is my gf i guess.lolz
-HG
That was written in 2009. As of 2014, 5 years later, 94% of Stack Overflow traffic is from search engines.
54x more of the traffic is from Google than Bing. And Bing delivers 5x much traffic as Yahoo, which is the next in the list…