Google Still winning search wars, Microsoft big loser | Hacker News Reader

Google Still winning search wars, Microsoft big loser

techcrunch.com

18 pointscoglethorpe6 comments

I was about to leave a comment about how this isn't really news. It feels like every search market share update for the past few years has been the same - Google gains, everyone else loses or stands still.

I love Google's search product, but this trend is deeply troubling. Websites live off of search visitors, and you wonder as the Google monopoly grows stronger and they feel the pressure to increase quarterly earnings, how they might try to siphon off even more of the search traffic for their own profit. With no other alternatives, it could mean bad things for the web.

Can you explain what "they might try to siphon off even more of the search traffic for their own profit" means? How does one siphon off search traffic? By building a better product?

Google could siphon off traffic by adding more ads, integrating direct lead generation forms, or funneling visitors toward Google products. For example, take a look at the search results examined in this blog post:

http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/google-stops-showing-search-resul...

I don’t begrudge Google continuing it’s march up the popularity. I don’t see anything wrong with that.

I don't find it troubling either. At least not right away. It would be troubling if 1) Google uses unfair means to increase it’s dominance. If company produces a great product and everyone flock to it, you can’t really bitch that. 2) If Google uses it’s dominance in search market to shut out competition in other market.

This is a tough question because Google does have by far the best search product. The problems arise when they have such a dominant market position that they control virtually all search traffic. At that point, they can do anything they want to publishers because they don't have any recourse. The only option is to beg for Google's favor.

This is a bad thing, because it allows Google to leech the value out of search traffic that is created by publishers. Jakob Nielsen wrote an article explaining this:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/search_engines.html

The web gets hurt when Google sucks so much value out of search traffic that publishers don't have the economic incentive to keep adding value to the web.

I think part of the issue isn't that Google is doing evil so much as once you get a certain market-share, it causes problems. People generally don't care because the problems that are happening aren't problems for end-users; they're problems for advertisers.

If Google becomes the only game in town for search, their ad rates will rise simply because advertisers won't have another outlet for search advertising. Likewise, ad rates at Yahoo are suffering today since the mindset is always to advertise on Google and the greater competition in Google's ad auctions make their pricing a lot higher. Personally, I find it a good reason not to run ads on Google (since it's cheaper for the same thing), but if Google's dominance keeps going up, it's going to cause problems.

So, even if Google does nothing, by getting to a certain size (compared to the overall size of the market), it causes problems. Of course, I'd much rather Google in that position than Microsoft <<shudder>>.

I don't begrudge Google either - they've acted as good corporate citizens offering a wonderful service. However, even if you're good and doing nothing wrong doesn't mean that problems don't arise.

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