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
Thanks! I guess it should have occurred to me to Google it myself.
I’m not yet bitter enough to reject monopolies on principle - I still think it’s possible for a benevolent overlord, like google, to rule with compassion, making everything easier for the common folk. So I’ve never bitched about Microsoft’s de facto monopoly - but I’ve got plenty to complain about the products and service they provide.
Such a search result may mean that you optimize your site for Google. If this is the case, the cost of switching may be a bit higher, as we have a net effect of users using the engine sites are optimized for.
/me defaults to Yahoo for exactly that reason.
Alternatively: two weeks may not be enough time for the indexers to pick a new site. Check this again in a month or so.
Google got to where they are because for some reason, everybody who tried to compete went and whored up their start page with repulsing advertisements. They were the only ones who weren’t total jackasses to the consumer.
But now, it is very dangerous that Google has this power. It’s not just about searches.
When they wanted to sell a cell-phone, they did what no other cell-phone carrier can do. They put an untargeted ad on the google.com start page.
Google is an advertisement company, and they certainly do have a monopoly on everybody’s attention. They have more control over what you know than anybody else.
Your article highlight very well the fact that ANY website shouldnít be dependant of ANY search engine(s).
A website doesnít need Google to run as a car needs fuel to run.
When we search, you are on a state of mind we want a relevant answer with instant gratification.
This state of mind apply very well to StackOverflow (or when we look for something to buy).
Search engine(s) and their adverts are good for this kind of traffic.
But there is many other reason why you can visit a website.
When you do your home-works well and discover how to really engage with your audience, you get DIRECT traffic that you deserve.
I congratulate you for your work for StackOverflow. Itís now a destination website like my dictionary. I donít need to use Google to get there.
If Google shut you down tomorrow, you will still exist for the same reason I read your blog: because of the people who created it, because of the community.
This link is more powerful than Google ranking or search result relevance.
I think itís just lazy base any online presence solely on search engine(s) and their advert programs.
The most important thing is to find a place to stay in the head of your visitors and make sure they become regular users of your website.
That story-line cannot and will never be based on SEO tactics.
Your website stop to exist when people donít see any reason to use it. Not because they canít find it.
Most clicks through Google deliver a good user experience. Google created enough reasons for people to bring them back. Not (only) because itís their default search engine.
So switching is NOT that easy from the IT-low-literate user to the most advanced one.
The good news is every website can deliver top-notch user experience: treat well your visitors, turn them into real kick-ass users (at that stage they even might become fans).
Those websites have to do first their home-works.
Then you can invest into building relationships with other websites and maybe, only maybe, use a boosting online advert campaign to reach new visitors.
Best Regards.
Thibault
I can’t believe people are saying Google’s monopoly isn’t scary because another search engine is just two clicks away. Yes, another search engine is just two clicks away NOW. But what will you do in 3 or 5 or 10 years, when other competitors have given up because there is simply no point in competing with Google?
The choice you say you have is dependent on a marketplace Google now controls. It is like saying you have a choice of ice cream at Baskin Robins. Certainly you have a choice… of the 31 flavors they give you to pick from.
It doesn’t matter how well-earned their monopoly is, or how good their products are, the very fact that they are a monopoly means that it is virtually impossible for any other company to enter the market, and the ones that are there trying to compete are, as the statistics show, failing miserably against Google.
My two cents…
It’s not a monopoly…
Google has competitors, but it performs much better than it’s competitors for most of the ‘market’. Or rather, for the largest demographic. It’s kind of a market, but not a normal one, where money is exchanged. Hum.
Anyway, Google’s success, and therefore it’s presence as a ‘monopoly’ depends on it’s quality of service versus the others. It may be that Google’s quality of service is so much better than it’s competitors that it’s current development is hardly driven by their competition, but yet they seem to be developing their services anyway. Even if Google were to suddenly start taking advantage of their ‘monopoly’ by discriminating search results, as the blogger suggests, the absolute most Google’s overall quality could drop is to that of Yahoo, it’s biggest competitor. As Google’s misuse of it’s success became known to the public, competing search engines, and probably new ones also, would begin taking up more of the ‘market’.
For the time being, Google is succeeding because it is providing a better service, and it is not taking advantage of the situation in a way that offends or alienates it’s userbase. I think the argument of the poor, exploited public under the sinister giant corporation is very inapplicable in this situation, and tired besides. Give the public and yourself more credit than that.
However, when we see all it’s competitors totally cease to exist mysteriously, it may be time to start voicing suspicions.
Yes, google is Spiderman.
And as Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben says: With great power comes great responsibility.
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
People may reconsider until after Google is considered guilty of monopoly abuse and when their abuse becomes a problem. Until then, feel comfortable monopolies happen. They come and go as market changes. Google too will fall eventually, one day or the other. Microsoft is a big problem right now and people were right to be up in arms.
I’m not scared about Google’s monopoly itself, but about trying to expand to more and more areas. If you watched Wall-E (who hasn’t?) you’ll notice that giant monopoly named Buy N’ Large, which has complete control over lives of humans, basically, a business that sells everything and is also the government. This is what I fear about google. First it’s a web search engine, then a web browser, map service, photo service, video uploading service, now they have their own mobile phone operating system. In the future, who knows, maybe all manufactured products on earth will be branded Google and the CEO of Google will be the president of the world. It’s not scary as a traditional monopoly, it’s scary as the company that controls the start page of the internet.
Jeff,
this is exactly what prompted me to stop publishing a perl script to automatically return a Google search rank (at the risk of violating Google’s Terms Of Service):
http://damienlearnsperl.blogspot.com/search/label/RankSearch?max-results=100
Without indexing from the Google search engine, your site might indeed be inexistant.
Microsoft Word, Excel, and C++ (to name three apps) all had to compete against products that dominated the existing market. And the Microsoft products became the new market leader by being better and cheaper.
For Word and Excel this was true, they were better products … now I’m not so sure? C++ was the way to program Windows because it was from Microsoft that is why it was the best for programming Windows, if it was a better C++ compiler they that was incidental (the same went for VB, when Delphi first came on the scene Delphi was far superior and VB had to raise it’s game to compete…even though it was from Microsoft)
DOS ain’t done 'till Lotus won’t run is a myth.
http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/08/dos_aint_done_t.html
Never mind that Microsoft’s killer feature in the OS space has always been backwards compatibility. It’s basically the opposite of that. DOS was not as powerful as Lotus at the time.
Pick another reason for MS to be evil.
I know a few people who have switched from using Google because they consider it to be too much of a monopoly - not including me.
Another question is, what percentage of those millions of hits from Google are worthless accidental clicks? What if only 10% from Google were worthwhile and intentional, but 90% of Yahoo clicks were intentional. Of course, more would still come from Google, but if a search engine causes less noise, isn’t it a better engine.
(Disclaimer: I use Google myself, not Yahoo!)
As many other posters have noted, the reason Google’s dominance isn’t particularly frightening is the lack of lock-in. I almost always use Google search, but I occasionally use other search engines - and though I find the results generally less relevant, they work just fine.
Really, I’m more worried about gmail and other Google apps - but as long as Google provides IMAP access and reasonable export options, I’m not about to panic.
Realistically, if Google disappeared tomorrow, even with the apps, I’d be much less inconvenienced than if MS disappeared tomorrow. I bet ad-sense dependent sites wouldn’t be as relaxed, however.
Google’s dominance probably isn’t good for the ecosystem (as it means less competition), but it’s not nearly as troublesome for the user as Microsoft’s.
Hi Jeff,
You are completely right about google, all the sites I run get 10x the traffic from google than any other search.
But i have been wondering if this is just Google or also us, we as developers put so much effort in to optimising for Google over all else, webmaster tool kit anyone. would you do that same for Live??
if every other search engine in the world shut down tomorrow, our website’s traffic would be effectively unchanged. That’s downright scary.
If Google shuts down tomorrow, probably your website traffic would also be unchanged, because people would inmediatly start using other search engines, and traffic will come anyway.
@Jaster - if Excel was a better product, why did it fail so miserably in the market place? It was way behind lotus, visicalc and Quto pro. In fact, it wasn’t seriously on the playing field. Word - that’s another story. It was good and quickly became popular.
M$ solution - put the two together for the price of Word and call it Office. That way, why would people purchase superior spreadsheet products when they already had one that did the job for free?
To this day I believe that the function names and charting ability were/are superior in Quatro pro. Lotus function names were better too - but even that didn’t have anything on Quatro pro. Whether you agree or not, it is on historic record that Excel had a small market share until it was bundled. Same thing with Internet Explorer.
RE Lotus - I don’t know who is re-writng history (maybe the victor???) but I lived through those years. I had lotus not work after upgrading to DOS 4. I had to aquire a patch from Lotus (and this is the days before internet). I read the DOS 4 story in a biography (Hard Drive), and I am not going to confirm that I know it to be true, but the fact of the matter is that Lotus DID NOT WORK with DOS 4. If they tested Lotus first, then they failed at testing.
I met a MS person a couple of years ago who was on the OS development team who admitted it. Actually - I just made that up, but I used the same mythical sources as the link posted to indicate it never happened.
But - MS was not a monopoly then, and it isn’t a complete monopoly now.
My fear is that if Google searches do become the only searches done, they can set whatever advertising price they want and they can decide whom they want to advertise with them. That sends a shiver up my spine.
So… how long do you think it will take for a better search engine to evolve?
The ultra-ultra-high 350x figure may be skewed in part by stackoverflow itself. Doing a stackoverflow search resulting in no matches returns Alternately, try your search in Google: with a conveniently clickable link. If there were a couple search engine options there, I wonder what kind of difference it would make.
A change like that may not have much impact (Iíd always click the google one anyway), but I still find it interesting that stackoverflow is playing a part in its own exposure to the dangers of this monopoly.
Google just offers a service. It offers it for free. Take it or leave it. As long as it’s good, people take it. If it gets bad, people leave it within seconds. People don’t depend on Google, they make themselves depending on it by not using another engine. They could switch to another engine within a couple of seconds, though. Other engines are currently directing so little traffic to StackOverflow because so little people are using them… not because SO is not in the search index of these. If more people were using them, they’d still find SO and the numbers for other search engines would rise. People just don’t see a reason for switching, since Google works nice for them.
This is different to Microsoft. Microsoft offers a product. An expensive one. If you decide to buy it, you cannot just switch to something else within a couple of seconds (exchanging Windows on your HD with Linux is far from being an easy process). Further you won’t get your money back if you switch, so you want to get the best for the money you paid, which means you must stick to the bought product until this product has finally paid of or you wasted a whole lot of money. Unlike people dependency to Google, that people can break up themselves by just typing another URL into their browser, the dependency on Microsoft (and their Windows) is much tighter, much harder to break, makes them feel much more like being caught in chains.
Despite that fact Microsoft’s political used to be pretty bad in the past. This has changed. Microsoft is far, far less evil today as it used to be. Some things they are doing today even seem reasonable to me and sound like good ideas… despite the fact that I still see gigantic deficits in Windows and MS is fighting really hard to get rid of them, each Windows editions taking them one step further to this goal… but it’s still a long road to go. Google on the other hand used to be the good guys and their image is just slowly fainting (their interpretation of privacy sometimes suck, they don’t always act as good as one would expect, etc.)
As always in live, good and bad are just to ideals and everyone swims between them. MS getting cleaner, Google getting dirtier, but there is still no reason to out onto the streets. If Google starts getting too evil, there is also no need to go out on the streets. People will just stop using Google and that’s it (not causing them any financial loss, as they never paid for it in the first place).
BTW, I think every search engine sucks. I search via allplus.com, a meta search. It will search Ask.com, Google.com, Yahoo.com, and Live.com (Microsoft), merge the results (recognizing the same page referenced by multiple results), categorize the results into clusters and show the results nicely sorted by average rating among the used search engines. Further it runs an image search, a blog search and a video search as well (if the used services offer such a search) and shows top results of these by the side. If you like, you can quickly switch to a full image/video/blog search.