Nothing from Cuil?
Just kidding, it’s only a problem if Google stops following its motto. As long as they play nice it’ll be fine, otherwise people will start migrating to other search engines and a more balanced competition will emerge.
They deserved their place at the top, I’m ok with the virtual-monopoly they have.
Has anyone noticed that google seems to be quite tech oriented? try googling for the word Factor on both google, Live, and yahoo. What would you expect the results to be? The O’Rilley factor? Factoring prime numbers? Factor on wikipedia or a dictionary? On google #1 is the factor programming language. On live factor on wikipedia followed by factor.com and the o’rilley factor, then the programming language. Yahoo some how comes up with the X-factor comic over the word factor on wikipeida.
So what do you have? Yahoo which just sucks, Live that is a little better if you are looking for non technical terms (but still pretty good for tech terms as well) but owned by the evil empire and Google.
Lack of competition don’t always mean lack of innovation. And the reverse is also true, lots of competition don’t always result in innovation. Google is still improving their search engine and doing lots of innovations in the area (custom searches, etc).
I think it is because the search engine market has already been shown to be amenable to entirely new players taking over the market. Google itself showed that a new search engined could come in without any sort of OS support and completely take over the market. There’s no reason to think that this couldn’t happen again.
As far as I know, the only leverage Google has over other search engines today is being the default search engine for Firefox. Given that that browser is still no where near the dominant browser, that is not much.
High market share is not the same as a monopoly. High market share is only bad when it is achieved through some means other than having the best product.
I sometimes use the MSN live search bar at the top right of my browser and curse when I realise what i’ve done. The results are apauling, even Cuil.com provided better results.
Just to make myself feel better, I become a litte devil may care. Instead of hitting ‘Home’ to get to google I search for it using msn live search and get it that way.
Maxam brings up a great point about advertising. I have heard many stories about Google being quite shady when it comes to sponsored click through advertising. A common practice seems to be that the day before they owe you your first cheque that they cancel your contract stating that you’ve artificially upped the number of click throughs.
There’s no defense for it since the way the contract is written is entirely in Googles favor.
It’s easy to hate on Microsoft because they’ve done some bad things, but anyone who thinks that they are the only one playing dirty pool is fooling themselves.
The last three paragraphs are vintage Atwood. I almost stood up and clapped. Google is the T-Rex in the room in a bunny suit.
Hell, I’m standing up now. Clap…clap…clap.
Not being sarcastic, either!
Ye, what can we do.
I saw an example of this a few days ago.
I keep a personal blog on blogspot and mentioned a family ancestral surname that had about three Google hits.
As a goof, about five minutes later I googled the name, and Holy Web Traffic, Batman! there was my post at the top of the results. Five minutes!
Wow. AOL and Altavista are still around? Who knew?
Jeff, I would love to see a point counterpoint with Robert Scoble:
http://scobleizer.com/2009/02/09/is-the-real-time-web-a-threat-to-google-search/
You guys are like ships passing in the night.
For those who asked about the image I found a link to the origin by doing a quick google image search. See http://www.newyorker.com/online/2007/05/14/slideshow_070514_banksy?slide=10
People who worry about Google forget about altavista. Back in its day altavista was the same as google is now with everyone worrying that it was taking over the internet. Then altavista starting doing stupid stuff, like filling up its page with ads, and people started switching to google because it was faster. When google messes up, and does not fix it, people will switch; the problem is would you switch to?
Google works, is quick, allows me to customize stuff to how I want it, and return links that are good and unless it is something really obscure has the information I need on the top page. All of those are things other search engine have problems doing.
I’ll google a solution to this problem
I’m a little surprised all the people who were so up in arms about the Microsoft monopoly ten years ago aren’t out in the streets today lighting torches and sharpening their pitchforks to go after Google.
Clearly, that’s because most of the people who had a problem with Microsoft then, and the vast majority who have a problem with Microsoft now, don’t care about monopoly but simply DON’T LIKE MICROSOFT. I would wager if it was Red Hat, or Suse/Novell or Google or anybody else having a monopoly there wouldn’t have been half as much complaints.
Google is not only the only relevant search engine, it also starts to effect what media i want to write for. I recently wrote a blog post concluding As far as iím concerned, if you canít find it through google, it doesnít exist. And if it doesn’t exist, why write it?
(More here: http://www.andrejkoelewijn.com/wp/2009/01/31/why-are-you-still-writing-articles-for-magazines/)
I see a number of differences between Google and Microsoft:
I opt to use Google. Windows comes bundled.
Google doesn’t go out of their way to prevent me from using alternatives.
I don’t have to pay extra charges if I decide to use Yahoo! instead of Google. If I decide to use Linux, I’ll still pay for the bundled Windows.
Windows has lousy stability (at the time of the monopoly charges), Google doesn’t.
Privacy on the internet is the next big thing, and Google will loose, badly, when people start realizing.
Found a pretty neat site for the privacy addicts:
I’m a little surprised all the people who were so up in arms about the Microsoft ‘monopoly’ ten years ago aren’t out in the streets today lighting torches and sharpening their pitchforks to go after Google.
Google isn’t forcing out competitors like Microsoft was, they’re just winning by being better. Plus, people are a little wiser now and realize that technical advantage isn’t forever. Google doesn’t have video search nailed. Their other products aren’t winning that big. The biggest problem with the Microsoft monopoly was that it was really difficult to change away from their desktop OS, even though it wasn’t that stable until Windows XP came along. When XP turned out to be really good, and when Firefox came along to make IE look bad, people started complaining somewhat less about the monopoly.
I am not surprised that you are pretending to be surprised.
Looking at just your site’s referrer logs doesn’t give you the full picture. According to at least one source, only 20% of the world uses Google exclusively. It’s still nearly 3 times the loyalty Yahoo gets (8%), but 55% of internet users make use of multiple search engines.
Yeah, one study doesn’t make the whole thing either, but a wider perspective is important.
thanks to daniel for the link to google-watch. linking google to 9/11 is a bit of a stretch…