If you are a web admin and you check your web log, you will see Google search engine crawl your web site 20 times more than the rest (yahoo, microsoft etc.) combined. So, Google search engine works much harder, maybe smarter, much better.
I have no complaint about the monoculture position of Google search. Google simply has been playing much harder and much better than the rest. Google earned it, Google deserve it, and can we turn the fear into respect?
If Daimler-Benz had 90% of the world’s car business and a few plebes drove Ford Escorts, would anyone complain?
I would not be concerned about a monopoly until Google starts actively seeking the demise of it’s competitors - a la M$.
as a ford escort driver (92) I’d complain if I had to drive a chrysler.
I guess the only reason Google gets its way is because it is still the best.
Really? How the hell would we know?
A couple of peeps have already mention that Google needs a competitor
BUT ****
What if that competitor has already slipped through a side door and realised that Google is more about selling adverts than recommending the best sites.
AND ****
that your best chance of finding what you want is from your friends!!!
on sites like FACEBOOK 
):
Only joking ;0)
I put the difference between MS and Google as follows:
When I buy a PC, I get MS whether I like it or not (even though I use Linux). At work, I use Outlook, which automatically spawns Word every time I create an email (and while you can turn it off, it breaks the email to everyone you send it to). If I create an Excel spreadsheet, it’s difficult to open it in anything but the same version of Excel (and it will helpfully convert everything into it’s local format).
When I use iGoogle, it might tell me about GMail, but they’re still separate programs - GMail doesn’t make me use Google Docs to compose emails.
Comes down to two things:
Simple: Google isn’t included on my PC by default.
It wasn’t? When I got a laptop from Dell, google desktop and some kind of IE google toolbar were both preinstalled.
As an user seeking results for my query, I can hardly complain, Google is still the best choice. But as a webmaster, the possibility of my sites being made disappeared without breaking a virtual sweat does give me the creep. The easy alternate choices within seconds would apply to all people, some are as dependent to Google as they were to Microsoft.
As an user seeking results for my query, I can hardly complain, Google is still the best choice. But as a webmaster, the possibility of my sites being made disappeared without breaking a virtual sweat does give me the creep. The easy alternate choices within seconds wouldn’t apply to all people, some are as dependent to Google as they were to Microsoft.
(reposted, corrected for a typo made above)
I’ve found that 100% of the time, google is on top, no questions asked, but depending on the market and geographical location; Others make up as much as 20% of traffic, and up to 5% of the overall traffic is not the ‘top-three’ search engines.
You’re absolutely right though, for anything remotely technical. My blog has stats like SA (dozens of times more from google than from any other). Anybody who uses the internet seriously uses something other than IE, and searches with google.
Anybody who uses the default home page from their ISP though… is another story all together.
Let’s all not use Google. Let’s reinvent it.
Google DOES abuse it’s poweróquite often. It is loathe to include news or content content that is viewed as un-PC. Let’s face it, we may not agree with some of the content that is out there, but I would still like to be able to search for it.
Google does it’s fair share of censoring the webópromoting sites they like, and deleting those they don’tóand most are blissfully unaware.
Jeff,
You know me, I am always interested in elephant stories!
If Google went away no one’s website would disappear. That’s because Yahoo and Live would still be around. The would fill in the gap. Not very well, obviously, but everyone would have to use something.
BTW, who still uses Altavista??
The numbers are even bigger than your chart shows because, I believe that seznam, ask, and even yahoo may use may defer some of their search to google.
The reason no one is up in arms against google the way they are with microsoft has more to do with their business practices than because one is free and not the other. Ubuntu is free and it’s superior to ms, yet it’s a long way off from dominating the market.
I think that many people despise MS because they act like an evil empire. Their business model is designed to tear down and destroy their competition. And as a result they turned some great technologies and companies into roadkill. And all the while reinventing and putting out inferior technology, while trying their best to create a situation where there is no choice. And Apple would have been worse. If the mac had won out over windows, we’d still be paying $5000 for a computer.
Google on the other hand has an inclusive business strategy. They get rich and so does everyone else. Even the other search engines make money from google ads! And instead of destroying, they are creating goodwill by giving to the community. The Gutenberg Project, summer of code, and sketchup come to mind.
The only reason that google has been immune to windows attacks and what separates it from the other companies who dared to compete with MS is that it is a free business model. If you had to pay for google services, MS would have used their unfair market advantage to trample them before they got this big, like they did to so many before them. They buy or create inferior technology and put it out for free. Think,
Internet Explorer, hotmail (wasn’t inferior until the got rid of the unix base), jbscript, java, outlook express, windows search, olpc, and in the third world they are trying to defeat drown linux by letting them pirate their software, hoping to get market share and then hitting them later when they are locked in. the list goes on…
For now, at least, google is sticking to the mantra of do no evil. I hope it stays that way, because I remember how painful search was before google came on the market. (And to think, Altavista, and Yahoo, could have had their search technology for a million bucks!)
I’m willing to bet a good two-thirds of the referrals from Google are due to people using Google to search the site.
This may be due to the piss-poor built-in search.
Google rocks always.
I use windows live search exclusively. In my limited testing, it proves just as good as google.
Microsoft enjoys 95% market share in their core market because of a positive feedback loop, not because it’s better. See: VHS vs Beta (although admittedly there is a case to be made that VHS was actually technically superior in some respects, but you get the point).
Or more importantly, MS-DOS vs CP/M-86, and I say that because MS got big because you guessed it, MS-DOS won this war. How? Because DR basically dropped the ball, leading IBM to ask MS for an OS, MS bought SCP’s 86-DOS and renamed it MS-DOS and licensed it to IBM. Then a clone industry began that tries to follow IBM, and the OS was no exception. CP/M-86 was available later but was not popular due to, I think, the high price.
From http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/what_we_did:
Where did they go? They went to GNU/Linux, a free and open source operating system built by a growing community, running on x86 systems. Why? Because the pair (Linux on a whitebox) delivered, then, better grid performance, with more flexibility. We didn’t erect barriers to exit, we promoted customer choice. Even when it cut the wrong way, as it did here. And yes, it hurt.
Sounds like a dilemma, don’t it?
Read the rest of the blog post to see how Sun Microsystems solved this dilemma properly.