Gap Between Google and Competition Widening

eldavojohn writes "Business Week has up an article trying to explain why it is getting harder and harder to 'catch' Google in the search engine game. We've heard of many different kinds of search engines and many different companies entering the market but: '... Google keeps gaining share in the face of newly launched capabilities on other engines. In August, Google sites gained 6.8 percentage points of search share from a year earlier, according to researcher comScore Media Metrix. Meantime, Yahoo lost 1 percentage point, Microsoft's sites lost 3.3 percentage points, and Ask.com lost one-half of a percentage point.' All of this on the heels of recent news that A9 scaled back its features. Is it possible to think of a number better than a one with a hundred zeros behind it?"

Yep.

Is it possible to think of a number better than a one with a hundred zeros behind it?

A google-and-one?

Even better!

The Google-plex!

Re:Even better!

Mod parent up!
    A googol [wikipedia.org] (correct spelling of the mathematical term) is a 1 with a hundred zeros, but a googol-plex [wikipedia.org] is a 1 with a googol of zeros behind it! (Read the Wikipedia article on it, lots of cool factoids :).

Re:Even better!

Back before there was a Google, my nephew got in trouble for bringing up the googol in math class. My father told him about googol. The teacher told him he was making it up and gave him detention. Ah, the perils of the New Jersey public education system.

Re:Yep.

That doesn't make one "bit" of difference... wait... or does it?

Re:Yep.

Nigel: Well, it's one searchier, isn't it? It's not google. You see, most blokes, you know, will be searching at google. You're on google here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on google on your computer. Where can you go from there? Where?

Marty: I don't know.

Nigel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?

Marty: Put it up to google plus one.

Nigel: google puls one. Exactly. One louder.

the infinity search engine

but the domain name is so long noone ever uses it

Re:Yep.

I'm a fan of '3 ???' , as it always seems to lead to profit.

Um..

A 1 with 100 zero's behind it is a Googol... As far as I know, a Google is a search engine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googol [wikipedia.org]
http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Google_(company) [uncyclopedia.org]

Odd

It's odd that people should say Google are widening the gap... Google's certainly the best, but lately I've been noticing a lot more search results that lead to pages that don't load, or result in 404s (in fact, a domain I used to run 3 years ago is still in Google's index).

Is google not removing ages from their index to try and seem impressive, or getting lax with recrawling sites? Or am I the only one noticing this?

Re:Odd

Noticed that too. Many 404s, outdated pages (which are USUALLY in the cache tho) or pages that have not a single reference to the search terms.
Another truly annoying set of results are links to other SEARCH sites indexing some pages which may or not have anything to do with the search terms.

Ganz Scheiß

This is all very ironic nonsense; Google showed us just how easy it really is to catch up with "the big guy." Back when Yahoo and Altavista were king, Google overthrew those powerhouses like it was Superbowl III. The key was Google knew what people wanted, and gave it to them. Now, certainly, it doesn't seem like Google is going to forget that anytime soon, and no, it's also not likely at this point that a little guy could wipe out Google, but who knows?

Look at the way great ideas have grown quickly: YouTube, digg, and so on.

And you can bet that if someone came up with a radically new search algorithm that provided noticeably better search results than Google (which is actually falling a bit behind, which is a dangerous mistake...) you can believe that most people would quickly migrate to their new engine of choice. (Of course, if it had little to no ads, speedy and reliable service, etc...)

Better search options

I find that Google is becoming less and less useful.

The web now has become so large that a simple keyword search just doesn't cut it anymore. Try searching for information about a popular digital camera from someone who isn't trying to sell them. It is next to impossible. (Yes I know about http://www.givemebackmygoogle.com/ [givemebackmygoogle.com] - a good try, but not really addressing the fundamental problem.)

The best way that search could get better in my opinion is to introduce some kind of filtering on the type of organisation that produces the pages you are searching for. Google already does a bit of this with Google Scholar [google.com]. But we need something far more general, and more to the point, a facility for excluding results of particular types, e.g. blogs, sites trying to sell something, ...?

I know that some people will complain that it may be a very subjective judgement whether site X is commercial or not. But search results are never going to be perfect anyway. Let's have the improvements where they are available, and worry about the corner cases later.

They appear to be addressing this piecemeal

For example, if you search google for the name of any common drug (even if you use the generic chemical name instead of the brand name), you'll get options immediately to narrow your results to a bunch of useful subcategories; for example I just did a search and got this before the rest of the results: (I've inserted brackets to show where the links are, or just do the search yourself)

Refine results for Clonazepam:
[Drug uses] [Interactions] [For patients] [From medical authorities]
[Side effects] [Warnings/recalls] [For health professionals]

Now, if they could extend this kind of categorization to consumer electronic devices, I think that would address your main concern.

Re:Better search options

'digital camera -sale -site:.com'; just keep excluding results until you're left with what you want.

The only way to get accurate, personalized results from a flexible search engine is to learn at least some basic query syntax. I don't want digitalcameras.google.com, laptops.google.com, anythingyoucanthinkof.google.com to walk me through making common searches, because it's more effective, flexible and easier to just add on a few extra clauses yourself.

Article Summary

Expanding Territory - Google is expanding into areas previously dominated by Yahoo!, Microsoft, and eBay.

New Formulas - Ask.com hopes their new smarter algorithm will win over searchers.

Topic Communities - Clusty.com has a new feature that retreives related topics to your query instead of related links.

Social Search - Yahoo! has been working hard at ... ask a question, get an answer sites.

An Issue of Trust - Ask.com and Snap.com work on a more visual interface compared to googles plain ordinary links returned.

Google Still Gaining - Google can easily acquire or replicate any new search method that makes signficant headway.

Inertia

Inertia is a powerful thing, people tend to not change services unless the one they are using has serious flaws, or a new one with a "must have" feature shows up.

Unless someone comes up with a revolutionary feature for search engines, Google won't be losing terrain any time soon.

Is it possible to think of a number better ...

Is it possible to think of a number better than a one with a hundred zeros behind it?
Yep...... 1

Although it is the loneliest number..

A9

Man, A9 must have the most wasted publicity budget. I see them prominently placed on sites like IMDB and Amazon, and assume they're "search this site", but no... it's just generic websearch, sometimes with a little bit of themed advertising content on the side.

The thing is, I don't go to IMdB and Amazon to do generic websearches, so it's kind of a waste. I have no idea what "value add" they're trying to bring to the table.

Plus, their name kind of sucks.

Being a HUGE Fan of Google...

...I have to say this is great news but not wholly unexpected. If you provide a very useful service for free, then you deserve to be at the top of the heap. There's no competing with free unless you're, oh how should we put this... BETTER.

Disruptive Technology

This article betrays complete ignorance of "disruptive" technology. These small percentage changes aren't what keeps executives awake at night. It's the prospect of one company making a breakthrough that changes the game significantly overnight and moves percentage points by a decimal point or more. It's good to see multiple players in the game. If google ever takes M$ and Yahoo out of the game entirely, we're much less likely to see such innovation.

They won't stay in front for long

As soon as my new search engine, Centillion, opens, Google won't see me for dust.

Nobody will be able to beat me, nobody!!!!!!

(Evil laugh)

Opposite of my experience

To me, more and more Google is a tiresome chore -- you have to make stuff work with it, but searches are hugely hampered by blogs, aggregators, search engine traps, link farms and so on to the point where:

If I want to find out about some general topic, I use wikipedia.
If I want to find out about a specific thing, I use a site such as riskglossary or MSDN.
If I want detailed facts, I use a bookshop, still as true today as it was before teh n3t started.
If I'm looking for a line from a half-remembered song, I use google.

In other words, google is strong when you want 'something that contains text X' but not strong for 'a page that describes 'X''. And Google's attempts to preserve quality can actually become a nightmare -- that's how Search Engine Optimization got to be a big business.

I like google and I use google, but to me, the days when it was my one-stop shop for absolutely every visit to the web are long gone.

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What else could I possible want?

Google have won this round of the search engine game. As far as keyword search goes, there is no reason for me to switch. They're free, they're fast, they almost always get the info I'm looking for in the first couple of links. There is simply no incentive to change. Unless google feck up (start to support wars/slavery so it becomes political, add one feature too many, finally stop with the search results and just returns ads)

However, its not sewn up. What I really want is a search engine that actually understands what I'm asking for. Rather than a library index, what I want is a librarian. The company that get that right will be the overal winners... but thats decades away - and I imagine it will come from left field, just like Google did.

I see no significant difference between Google

and, say, Clusty.com, except that the latter doesn't collaborate with the Chinese Communist Party.

Google Vs MSFT monopolies?

OK let us assume for a second Google is the defacto monopoly in search engine business. MSFT is the defacto monopoly in OS business. Are they same?

I dont think so. Google operates in a field where the switching cost to the user is zero. If GOOG does not deliver, it is extremely easy for the user to switch to a competing search engine. So I dont feel threatened by GOOG. But MSFT monopoly was created by increasing the switching cost to the user. It realized long before its customers, the key to revenue is lock them in. MSFT effectively confused interoperability with IBM-PC compatibility and later Windows compatibility and got bulk of the users locked in. As long as it prices its products, mainly MS Office a tad less than what it would cost the corporations to switch t a competing product they will keep raking money in. And they use the money to make sure that the playing field does not get leveled ever again.

So GOOG can keep its only if it constantly innovates and provides a better service than its competitor. As long as there is competitive pressure on a company, I dont begrudge any billions they rake in. But I strongly resent even pennies made by unfair companies that do not have the burden of competition. Cable monopolies, electicity utilities, MSFT, teacher unions, anyone who found a way to dodge the pressure of competition irks me. Because I am under so much pressure to constantly learn and fight off competitors 20 years younger than me who are gunning for my job.

so sad 'cause it so easy

all ask or other sites would have to do is implement some minimal set of filters, eg get rid of the link farms and a few other filters, better search features in advanced search (how do you say google sucks big time here) I'm sure /.s could add a few more

this is just like firefox: ALL you have to do is find the one or two really simple things people actually need and want
This would have the added benefit of reducing google revenue; the financial markets are fickle sharks, and one quarter unexpected bad news will cause google's stock to collapse

Google hardly useful overseas.

Google is, generally, the best search engine for English, and it's normalization is quite good -- i.e. widening the search to include plurals or singulars, recognize words that might need accent marks, and so on.

But frankly, Google and Pagerank suck when it comes to searching in languages like Japanese. I can search for a Japanese company or item and get two pages of completely irrelevant links first. Not spam links, but junk like blog posts. Normalization sucks; Japanese uses a mixed script (phonetic kana plus Chinese characters), and Google does no conversion or normalization when searching. It would be a cinch for anyone to top Google in the huge Japanese market, and I think they're already getting pummelled by Chinese search engine.

gain

Google may be loosing ground in quality. There results are often redundant, wiki.com, about.com, 404 sites, you get a bunch of canned results regardless of your search (or maybe I just search for things only on about and wiki). They have a few concepts they are working on; their coop is going bumping up their results (especially with health topics) they have rumors of launching mashups which would clean their results. They seem to be looking at other ways to provide the same data. I can search for a health topic or I can coop a health topic. I would assume they will start a few other sites (they have http://www.searchmash.com/ [searchmash.com] going) but I expect to see others come up with a variety of uses. The big upcoming challenge for search engines is to provide a smart list of sites, searches that produce safe sites to go to (no spy ware) sites with accurate information (not blogs and other junk which is all lies), I expect in the next few years the consumers will begin to demand this from the search engines once they get tired of the crap their computers catch on the net, they will want some filtering from the search companies.

Is it a case of "tall poppy syndrome"?

It seems that if you cant catch them, you take shots at them to change peoples view, or you try to change the rules to make it harder for them to succeed. We are seeing this with the threat of a non-neutral Internet where most proponents nearly always use Google as the example.

I think the shots at Google are a little bit of 'tall poppy syndrome' [wikipedia.org] kicking in. The only thing keeping Google from being resented is their 'humility' - that they aren't flaunting their position and their committed to 'not be evil' - like not handing the info to the NSA without a warrant like the 'others' did.

Firefox

I bet there is a correlation between the switching rate from IE to Firefox. It having google as prime search engine makes up for a lot of searches.

They missed the boat.

In general the main cause is the bigger search engines are still not even trying to copy the big selling points of google.

Their front pages are still a big abortion of pictures and junk. Google is simple "box + logo".

Their results are trying to coppy google but the no.1 thing the google results page sells is TRUST. Most people trust google that all adds are going to be labeled clearly and they will not be inserted into the results!

MSN/Yahoo/etc already missed the boat on this issue. If anyone is going to compete with Google it's going to have to be someone new at this point probably. Unless of course someone thinks up a new must have feature.

Google

Google for Google, Google that Google. Google. I sure hope someone is at least getting paid well for the dozen daily Google stories.

Surprising Google hasn't spawned a new rennaisance

I think among the tech crowd, it's a given that companies who cut back on R&D are simply shooting themselves in the foot. Google is all about R&D and trying out new ideas. The amoebic growth and success of everything "Google" should be more than just noticed by various companies... it should be mimicked.

Instead, we still see a whole lot of "heads in the sand" and people wondering why their previously successful business models are failing. But then again I can see where people are trying to demonstrate that they learned something from the dot-com failures too... but perhaps they didn't learn what they should have since a great deal of the mentality from the dot-com boom is present in Google's "just try it" ideology.

Google found a good way to make money.

Google, unlike other search engines, has figured out how to make money without annoying the users. Other search engines kept adding more and more ads and clutter. Google's clean interface, and relatively accurate searches have prevented me, and other people to switch to another engine. But I wish I knew a another good search engine, when my google seach turns up nothing.

If you want to understand why Google is winning...

Compare http://www.google.com/ [google.com] to http://www.lycos.com./ [www.lycos.com] Google realized early on that to win in the searching business, all you need to do is search really well. As long as I still have to scroll my browser page to see everything on a search site's front page, that search site is too complicated. Having a simple main page lets users set it to their home page with negligible impact to their browser's startup time; that really matters more than some people think.

AltaVista got the message, but they're still playing catch-up.

Google is about to get taught the lesson!

Google is about to get taught the same exact lesson that Netscape did. MS will not hesitate
to use their platform dominance to crush google from the face of the earth. Now of course MS is
probably going to get sued again for doing so but, so what the gains are much bigger than the penalties. MS is going to just keep them wrapped up in the courts for years until they are nothing more than a smoldering wasteland.

Google had a chance to avoid the defeat they are about to get dealt, but they are not thinking enough into the future. There best chance was to push firefox with the google toobar installed into as many desktops as they possibly could. That means putting the firefox download straight on the front search page in big bold print and advertising like a mad man to get it installed on everything possible including OEM's etc. In order to win and keep winning you have to own the browser / platform.

It's not "googol," it's "google..." as in Barney.

One-to-the-hundredth power is a "googol."

"Google" has no particular referent other than Barney Google, possibly the longest-running comic in history, about a "cigar-smoking, sports-loving, poker-playing, girl-chasing ne'er-do-well" and his hapless horse Spark Plug.

Barney Google was the subject of a hit song of the 1920s:

Baaaaaaarney Google! With his goog-goog-googley eyes!
Baaaaaaarney Google! Had a wife three times his size!
She sued Barney for divorce--
Now he's living with his horse!
Barney Google! With his goog-goog-gooley eyes!

Not suprise

try to search with string "IE7" with google and microsoft live and you know why

Google: You keep using that word.

Is it possible to think of a number better than a one with a hundred zeros behind it?

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. I think you are thinking of Googol [wikipedia.org]...

One hundred zeros...

That would be the other 100 search engines, then?

Does anyone know how to get google to do

specific matches?

Just yeaserday I was looking for Parklane park.

I got 10 pages hit for Park Lane -note the space.
Park lane inn
Park lane apartmaent, etc.

I don't want something 'close' I want exact. Putting it in quaotes does not help.

So, what obvious thing did I miss?

how much they've won

In the past six months, I've noticed two computer newb friends of mine doing the same exact thing-- When provided a URL for a website, they don't know they can type it into the browser's URL field. Instead, they use their bookmark for google (it's also set as their home page) and then type the URL into the google search field. In most instances, Google returns a link to the URL they have just typed.

In the most recent instance, it didn't because it was a website I had just created for my friend. He told me on the phone that he couldn't find the website I had sent him the URL for. I knew the domain was propagated in DNS, so this sounded odd to me. Then when I visited him at his house, I saw him typing it into google instead of the browser's URL field and I had to explain that google didn't yet know about the website and that he needed to request it directly.

The other guy opens his browser, which has google set as his home page, then he types "www.hotmail.com" into the search field so he can check his email.

So, yeah, Google has established itself as a fundamental component of the internet for many, many people.

Seth

Goog FTW!

For me Google always wins because Google just keeps making the searches return not just more information, but information that is more relevant. Combined with Google's advertisements, which have quickly become one of my favorite ways to shop, Google often has the answer to a lot of life's little questions and problems. Contrast that with other search engines: they just try stripping down to a barebones, Google-style layout, and then throw on lame features dreamed up by some team of idiots in marketing. Take Ask.com's cool new feature; the ability to view a tiny image of the page before I click through. This might be useful if the tiny image didn't make all of the text and images so tiny that they're illegible; in other words, it's mostly useless. Amazon tried giving the ability to remember past searches. I'll give them credit for this one, it really could come in handy when doing a lot of research via the web, especially if they would have written a nice Firefox plugin to enhance the capabilities. But because Google gives better search results, it doesn't matter. It's just easier to get better search results from Google and be careful when I take notes.

A word of advice to all of Google's competitors. Cut the crap. Just give better search results. And when you know you can't do better-I'm pointing at you, Microsoft and Amazon-just cut your losses and go focus on something that you do well.

Good News

If any of you do have plans for besting the 800lb gorilla, the domain 1E101.com is available. Let us know how it goes.

- p

length?

It's not the length of your search engine that matters. It's how you use it.

Does anyone remember id?

This whole article reminds me of a piece Wired did on id: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.08/id_pr.html [wired.com]

Money quote:

"I used to think the gap between those already doing this kind of work and those just getting into it would start to narrow," says Abrash. "Instead I think it's widening. People aren't catching up; they're falling further behind. A large knowledge base is required to do anything state-of-the art, and it takes longer and longer to acquire that knowledge."

It's my impression that other companies have caught up with id, as employees have left or been fired. Perhaps the same will happen with Google.

Compensation maybe?

Maybe it's because the best and brightest *WANT* to work at Google for a variety of reasons? If you have the best people, challenge them and compensate them accordingly, then you're going to be the best in whatever business you endeavor into.

Search engine capabilities I'd like to see...

An image search where...

1) You upload an image to the engine.

2) It searches for exact matches of the image, and shows you the URLs where they're hosted as well as any pages href'ing them, what the image has been renamed to, etc.

It can do some sort of advanced pattern recognition, allowing it to compare your uploaded query pic against images which look similar to it in the search engine's index. Upload a smiley face, for example, and it'll find you other smiley faces, or perhaps frowny-faces, etc.

If someone could build this, it'd be huge.

Percentage Point?

Back when I was in school we didn't have fancy shmancy percentage points, we had mere percents, and boy were we grateful!

There's one way how it could go wrong for Google

Privacy concerns. Google is amassing so much information it's not funny. By now it probably knows me better than I know myself. I do not like this at all.

research progress, core vs niche

I went to hear Norvig talk this week at Parc and found his talk interesting, yet uninspiring. Sadly it was marketing.

Like all large organizations, they have limited ability to focus on niche areas, and some of the really important niche areas they are completely ignoring. It really does always come back to limited resources.

Why have they been unable to complete with YouTube, and instead they are in talks for buying them for 1.X Billion?

Why do they have a litany of research projects that have limited to minimal adoption?

Why are they still focused on the big-numbers word game when it's clear that even with 100 Trillion+ word corpuses, they still only achieve 70-90% accuracy for various language tasks? ...

The answer to all of these questions is that they have a (massive) core business, and the focus of the company if to maintain and grow that core business. To really address the above issues and several other, critical ones toward their ultimate goal, they need to be "more different" than how normal, big companies operate. They need to separate out the core and build an internal financial ecology to mirror the outside world. They currently have an internal idea and development ecology - but that is not enough to incent the niche development internally.

Re:Monopoly? Oh no!!!?!?!?!?!!

Nothing wrong with having a monopoly. Abusing the monopoly is where we get problems.

Best technology.

It may actually be that anyone has yet to best any technology offerings Google has, hence nobody is able to challenge their dominance. Apart from that, Google is hardly a monopoly. You have a wide selection of search engines and nobody is forcing you to use any of them over the other.

Re:Real revenue comes from AdSense

Yeah but, the more people who are using the Google search engine the more people see the ads on Google. That means more money.

Re:MOD PARENT DOWN - ADSENSE WHORE

Nonsense. As /. (and blogs etc, usually) link with 'rel="nofollow"', this will do nothing to GP's pagerank.

Re:Real revenue comes from AdSense

You mean from AdWords? ;)

Re:Monopoly? Oh no!!!?!?!?!?!!

Being the best at what you do does not constitute a monopoly. Effectively being the only one doing what you do is a monopoly. And since search is a huge field comprised of a number of companies large enough that you can't count them on your digits, i'd have to say, parent hasn't a clue what it's talking about. Comments like parent aren't funny because they're not true and they don't make sense, regardless of the facetious intent. Please, either try harder, or just don't bother posting.

Re:Time for some anti-trust!

No, successs and being the best isn't wrong. Using your success and money to oppress others through unethical business practices is. There is a huge difference. Staying on top because you have a great product is one thing. Staying on top because you can quash others unfairly is another.