Why does google seem to dominate in the search engine market? Is it because they are an astonishing good producer, or do they have some grants of government privelege?
They are an astonishing goog producer. And not only in the search engine market.
Don’t you agree?
I work in search marketing.
Google is insanely good. Not good moral, but good business people.
The reason why Yahoo and MSN have failed so miserably, is that they have failed to recognize that search was more important than anything else as the web grew. Google focused on search from the outset, and built their company around that. They have the most mature method of ranking websites.
Take for example, Yahoo’s textual advertising service is not available to international publishers. What, 3 years after it’s launch?
Some of the best webmasters in the world come from Europe and Canada, and they cannot use Yahoo Texts Advertising on their sites, so there is less inventory, which means Yahoo can’t sell as much as Google, or have the same reach. Even if Google does 20 times the search volume (probably much more) for their ads in search, their content network has the same size as Yahoo could have. If they could ever deliver international service in order to increase their inventory.
So in a sense, I guess it is also that Yahoo and Live (MSN) are incompetent.
Ah, here it is in a nutshell. MSN and Yahoo want to be your destination, Google wants to be your travel agent. MSN and Yahoo have to compete against the entire web to be a destination, but Google will fly you everywhere.
A method which they have apparently patened. Would that give them an additional advantage against potential new competitors?
Not really. Web marketers are always trying to “game” the search engines. The smartest minds in the free market cannot figure out EXACTLY how they work. Particularly, with Google. People do a lot of trial and error testing, but because the web is an uncontrolled environment, it is very hard to generate consistent and absolute results.
Google bombing and Google bowling are examples of games that have worked, but Google has refined it’s algo to prevent those in the future. That’s another area where Google leads. Their search is a lot more progressive, aggressive and responsive than Yahoo or MSN. Like I wrote, Google puts a lot of resources into staying #1 in search, because that is the most important service on the web.
Google is like having a second brain.
Pretty much. With the somewhat recent introduction of converting hardcopy books to online literature in a big way, the search engine truly has become the ultimate database of everything there is to know for the time being, with few exceptions. Every year I need the local university library less and less.
Along those lines, Google has been the first to index PDFs by content, as well as Flash text.
This is what I mean. Google is relentlessly improving search to encompass new media types, I don’t believe Yahoo or MSN (could be wrong) are anywhere near that level of sophistication with their search.
I was with Compaq when they acquired AltaVista through a merger with DEC. Compaq tried grafting one of their own management teams onto AV, expecting to be able to spin it off as a separate company. I spent several months working at AV and had a ring-side seat to some of the strategic decisions and the arguments behind them. The AV staff did propose a “long tail” keyword based revenue model, the model that would later work for Google, but management chose to go instead with a banner ad model at first, then with a model that involved owning their own store and spamming the search results. When keyword based revenue models did get discussed it was always in terms of selling top keywords for large amounts, rather than trying to sell all the words for pennies each. One of the holdovers from the DEC management team used to shoot down arguments in favor of the keyword revenue model by whipping out a list of the top 100 search terms he always carried. The rankings never changed from day to day and number one was always “sex”, two was always the “f word”, ten and eleven were always two different spellings of "beastiality", and so on. The idea that large profits could be made selling keywords that only occur a few times a day, making tiny amounts on each sale just wasn’t convincing at the time.
It was two years later when Google came along with its clean front page and its keyword based revenue model. Those of us who had been at AV immediately thought it would succeed. I didn’t know it would be as big as it has become but I knew it would be profitable - something I don’t believe Alta Vista has achieved yet.
This thread reminded me of a magazine article I read while sitting in my bank a year ago. Apparently the creator of wikipedia (at that time) was planning to launch a search engine based upon user contribution. I just checked, and apparently the alpha version is out there. The very fact that it is an alpha version would no doubt lead one to believe that it is of course inferior to Google. I’m still unaware of how an open-source user-contribution search engine works… I read a meager amount regarding it, and I’ll probably read more later. Apparently if a user searches for something a bad result appears, they can delete that result permanently from the aforementioned search string. Sounds like it might have the blessing/curse aspect that Wikipedia has, but we’ll see.
Search marketing is all about market anarchism. Firms with products like Shamwow (I’m serious) look for marketing agencies to generate leads and sales.
Those marketing firms in turn work with marketers, age, race, nationality, sex, sexual preference, religion etc all don’t matter. What matters is how you get people to buy the product. A lot of people do search arbitrage, which is bidding on keywords, and then hopefully generating leads that generate more revenue than the total cost in clicks.
For example, 300 $0.10 clicks is $30. If a lead pays $29, you need to do it in 289 clicks or less to be profitable. Obviously there are skills and knowledge, tricks and hard work required, but the barrier to entry is your initial amount to invest in click advertising. Some people start with as little as $50, and look for a 100% ROI, and so on.
The people who really drive innovations in advertising online are not the merchants, and not the ad agencies, but individual contractors finding better ways to advertise, areas with low competition to exploit, etc.
If you think about it, the idea of hundreds of decentralized marketers working individually for their own profit with almost no regulation generates incredible returns and results for everyone. They are literally driving the industry from the bottom up.
Google started using the ODP as a base. Open Directory Project (DMOZ.org). It was a human checked directory, so all of the sites in it had theoretically been pre-screened.
Everyone keeps trying to build user refined search databases (that is what Digg and Stumbleupon are). The problem is, social networks are too narrow. They rely on submissions, because there is no way to get humans to check result 99 on page 10 of the SERPs and rank it. Users will generate your content with the right incentives (like this forum, allows us to create search engine friendly content for Mises.org, which helps broaden it’s footprint on the web), but people do not go online to endlessly complete quality surveys for no return.
I don’t know if people understand how relentlessly Google crawls the web. For instance, I bet in a 24 hour period, there is never more than 1 minute out of 1440 that Google is not crawling Mises.org with one of it’s various search bots. If you post a new thread here, with a unique title like say, “Mises was the 123rd most important person in history” it would show up in Google very quickly. I have seen threads in the forums in the search engine results pages (SERPs) almost instantly. So Google also crawls constantly, and updates it’s millions of mirrored databases in constantly, in real time.
Sometimes you can wait days to get into the indexes of Yahoo and MSN.
The Internet is weird. I would love to see what will eventually cause the Internet to eventually be “old and outdated.” Hopefully I live long enough, or hopefully it will come soon enough.