programming and human factors
by Jeff Atwood
I was browsing the sessions at an upcoming Search Conference, which describes itself thusly:
The way to online success is through being easily found in search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Live Search. While developers have historically thought of search as a marketing activity, technical architecture has now become critical for search success.
Anyone else see the elephant in the room, there? No?
Just two weeks after we launched Stack Overflow, I mentioned that search engines already made up 50% of our traffic. Well, not so much search engines as search engine:
I try to be politically correct in discussing web search, avoiding the g-word whenever possible, desperately attempting to preserve the illusion that web search is actually a competitive market. But it's becoming a transparent and cruel joke at this point. When we say "web search" we mean one thing, and one thing only: Google. Rich Skrenta explains:
I'm not a professional analyst, and my approach here is pretty back-of-the-napkin. Still, it confirms what those of us in the search industry have known for a long time.The New York Times, for instance, gets nearly 6 times as much traffic from Google as it does from Yahoo. Tripadvisor gets 8 times as much traffic from Google vs. Yahoo.
Even Yahoo's own sites are no different. While it receives a greater fraction of Yahoo search traffic than average, Yahoo's own flickr service gets 2.4 times as much traffic from Google as it does from Yahoo.
My favorite example: According to Hitwise, [ex] Yahoo blogger Jeremy Zawodny gets 92% of his inbound search traffic from Google, and only 2.7% from Yahoo.
That was written almost two years ago. Guess which way those numbers have gone since then?
Now that Stack Overflow has been chugging right along for almost six months, allow me to share the last month of our own data. Currently, 83% of our total traffic is from search engines, or rather, one particular search engine:
| Search Engine | Visits |
| 3,417,919 | |
| Yahoo | 9,779 |
| Live | 5,638 |
| Search | 2,961 |
| AOL | 1,274 |
| Ask | 1,186 |
| MSN | 1,177 |
| Altavista | 202 |
| Yandex | 191 |
| Seznam | 103 |
Those 6x and 8x numbers that Rich quoted two years ago seem awfully quaint now. Google delivers 350x the traffic to Stack Overflow that the next best so-called "search engine" does. Three hundred and fifty times!
Now, I don't claim that Stack Overflow is representative of every site on the internet -- obviously it isn't. It's a site for programmers. And let me be absolutely crystal clear that I have no problem at all with Google. That said, I find it profoundly disturbing that if every other search engine in the world shut down tomorrow, our website's traffic would be effectively unchanged. That's downright scary.
Yes, I like Google. Yes, Google works great and has been my homepage for about eight years now. Google nailed search, and they deserve the leadership position they've earned. But where's the healthy competition? Where's the incentive for Google to improve? All I see is a large and growing monoculture that acts as the start page for the internet.
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. Does the fact that Google's products are mostly free and ad-supported somehow exempt it from the same scrutiny? Isn't anyone else concerned that Google, even with the best of "don't be evil" intentions, has become more master than servant?
Calling the current state of search engine competition a horse race is an insult to horse races. No, what we have here is a one horse race where all the other horses were shipped off to glue factories years ago. Forget "search conference", you should be throwing a "Google conference", because there's no difference.
I don't know. Maybe that's OK. But it does mean that if Google, for whatever reason, decided to remove you from its search results, your website no longer exists. At least not as a viable business, anyway.
Just picking up on a couple of other commeters:
@JohnOpincare - If they do this frequently, there will be hell to pay.
@Jeff: fake competition of Coke vs. Pepsi
It is my understanding that Coke out sells Pepsi in almost every country around the world except USA, where Pepsi cola out sells every flavour of Coke. So Monopolies (or even duopolies and oligopolies) do not carry through all markets.
One other thing - monopolies (and other industries run by only a few companies) are either natural or transient.
Natural where it is expected that there will only be one player - like a postal service - and therefore should become governmet run as market forces will not work on them. As others have highlighted, they get to set the rules because nobody can go elsewhere.
Transient - A monopoly creates a barrier to entrance to the market, but over the long term no matter how large the barrier is, a competitor will always enter and out perform a long-standing monopoly. The reason is that a monopoly is economically unstable due to lack of innovative drive, and normally uncompetitive pricing structure. Think of other monopolies - they are normally the companies that are telling you about how they are innovating (why tell you if they actually WERE innovating), and can't actually justify the prices the charge (because they don't have to - i.e. oil companies).
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.
Andy Lee on February 9, 2009 11:31 AMI'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.
matt on February 9, 2009 11:44 AMSuch 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.
Harry on February 9, 2009 12:21 PMYour 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
PS: This is of course only one point of view.
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.
Grant on February 9, 2009 12:44 PMMy 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.
Ricardo B·nffy on February 9, 2009 12:46 PMI'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.
Magnus on February 9, 2009 12:58 PMJeff,
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.
damienlearnsperl on February 9, 2009 12:59 PMMicrosoft 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)
Jaster on February 10, 2009 1:11 AMDOS 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.
@Philip on February 10, 2009 1:22 AMI 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!)
Sam Schutte on February 10, 2009 1:34 AMAs 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.
Eamon on February 10, 2009 1:54 AMHi 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??
albear on February 10, 2009 1:54 AMif 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.
Pedro on February 10, 2009 2:53 AM@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?
Philip on February 10, 2009 3:02 AMThe 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.
Mecki on February 10, 2009 4:23 AMIf 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?
Andy Wong on February 10, 2009 5:08 AMIf 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$.
SammyB on February 10, 2009 5:27 AMas a ford escort driver (92) I'd complain if I had to drive a chrysler.
Steven on February 10, 2009 5:42 AMI 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)
Word of mouth Mike on February 10, 2009 7:34 AMI 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:
- Microsoft sells you a bundle of intertwined products: if you use one, you're pulled into using the rest (or suffer reduced effectiveness - try uninstalling Explorer and you'll see what I mean). Google sells a catalog of products - you can pick the ones that work for you, ignore the rest, and each piece works at full speed.
- Microsoft competes on output - everyone wants .xls files, so even if you want other products, you have to make your output match what MS expects (which is... MS formats). Google competes getting the job done - you can pull anything you want in, and it doesn't care. You can output it however you want, and it doesn't care.
- And of course, if iGoogle or Google Docs started being stupid tomorrow, it would be simple to just pick up your files and go somewhere else. Try doing that with your Office collection.
- Caveat: GMail is the tricky one, but it's no different from any other free email service.
@sep332:
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.
heartlessangelz on February 10, 2009 7:43 AMAs 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)
heartlessangelz on February 10, 2009 7:45 AMI'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.
Issac Kelly on February 10, 2009 7:50 AMLet's all not use Google. Let's reinvent it.
Charles on February 10, 2009 7:52 AMGoogle 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.
Practicality on February 10, 2009 8:30 AMJeff,
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??
MattH on February 10, 2009 8:45 AMThe 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!)
mookiemu on February 10, 2009 9:18 AMI'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.
Rob on February 10, 2009 9:20 AMGoogle rocks always.
Sarath on February 10, 2009 9:45 AMI use windows live search exclusively. In my limited testing, it proves just as good as google.
Brad on February 10, 2009 9:54 AMMicrosoft 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.
Oops, my link to the blog post was not parsed properly, here is the correct link:
http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/what_we_did
BTW, Jeff Atwood has a blog post devoted to issues just like this one.
Yuhong Bao on February 10, 2009 11:14 AMAnother company (whom Mu$t remain nameless) ensured that versions of its operating system would not be released without first ensuring a competetor's application wouldn't run. Sorry - but that's evil.
Well, shit, if you read that on slashdot, it must be true.
seanb on February 10, 2009 11:31 AMWho cares, seriously if search engines is a big concern for you than WAKE UP! There's a lot of things wrong in our world that needs serious attention but some people think it more important which OS to use. Get a life.
Fred on February 11, 2009 2:24 AMThe situation with Windows is completely different from that with Google.
Microsoft produces operating systems that are complete garbage these days, yet they are able to maintain their grip on the OS market because they _already have_ a lead. That's an abuse of their monopoly position.
On the other hand, Google _cannot_ abuse its position in such a way. Remember when Cuil was released? Everybody was so excited about it and wanted to try it out. If they had actually managed to create a better search engine, everyone would have switched to it _immediately_.
That's the difference between Microsoft's monopoly and Google's.
RLD on February 11, 2009 2:30 AMYou were curious why people got armed up against Microsoft's monopol on operation system (and office products).
And why this does not happen against the googolith of search enginges.
I guess it's Microsoft is representing the capitalistic way of software development. And Google is representing the open source development, at least for a lot of people.
If this is true or not ... I don't know. But that's my guess.
Juergen on February 11, 2009 2:53 AMJeff -
I've been using clusty for a while and like it for the most part (but that is not an endorsement in any way). I do wonder seriously about the efficacy of the entire web advertising model. Is there any hard evidence (independent, not produced by advertisers, advertising hosts, or advertising firms) suggesting a dollar spent on advertising yields more than a dollar in revenue?
- Lepto
Lepto Spirosis on February 11, 2009 4:16 AMYou just got me to realise that I really never even try the other search engines... I'm a google zombie already :P
Now, I went looking for a page that allows you to query several engines in one go and see the results side by side. So far I found http://www.searchrater.com/ which is an academic project that tries to assess the quality of the three big search engines (or, as you point out, the big one and the runners-up...). They don't tell you which one is which, of course.
yungchin on February 11, 2009 5:12 AMGlad to know my constant refreshing desperately looking for new questions isn't causing the server any problems :)
JaredPar on February 11, 2009 6:25 AMCan I just say, my favorite part of this post was your mention of how SEO really has a heavy technical leaning. I think SEO, like so many other three letter buzz words, continues to be misunderstood by the people who desire it.
John on February 11, 2009 12:56 PMThis isn't strange considering the alternatives are crap. I've seriously tried to use Live or Yahoo for a week but the results are literary useless.
Google is like a mindreader, i might remember some short phrase on a website i have visited and i want to find it again, i just type the phrase and google finds the page in the top 3 results.
On Live and Yahoo i can type the entire page-title and a full quote from the top of the page and i still have to go to page 3 to find the page i want.
It's the monopsony, stupid. Google's monopoly in search is only maintained by constant innovation on their part. (Microsoft's monopoly was maintained, in part, by malfeasance, but mostly by the larger failings of their competitors.)
The problem with Google is that if you have ad space to sell, Google is virtually the only buyer. That is where the money is, that is where the problem is, and that is where the conflict will be when, inevitably, Google abuses that power.
Ben on February 12, 2009 2:44 AMBecause it has trouble geting out of the bath?
MacBet on February 12, 2009 5:15 AMYes, google is Spiderman.
And as Spider-Man's Uncle Ben says: With great power comes great responsibility.
Google is also the default in Firefox, and obviously, Chrome. Might be the default in Opera as well.
I think the telling point is that (a) it's fairly simple to change the default, (b) the default is what most people want, and (c) if at some time, for some reason there was a better alternative, Google couldn't stop Firefox/Opera from changing the default.
A Gould on February 12, 2009 8:40 AMMichael C. Neel asks what would happen if you googled Microsoft Office. Well, instead of speculating, I actually did it. The first 4 entries went to Microsoft's site. The 5th item was news results for microsoft office and the 6th was shopping results for microsoft office. Only after that did something else come up - a wikipedia entry about MS Office.
I also googled office. Google's software did not appear above the fold, although MS's, as well as some entries that are not software related.
This supports the idea that Google is not manually tweaking the rankings to favor itself.
@Andy Lee
The Photo is taken from Bansky, a British street artist. He has a whole series called The Elephant in the Room.
Siraf on February 12, 2009 10:30 AMIt wasn't? When I got a laptop from Dell, google desktop and some kind of IE google toolbar were both preinstalled.
Google is also the default in Firefox, and obviously, Chrome. Might be the default in Opera as well.
Jeff Atwood on February 12, 2009 12:20 PMThe first comment by Andrew asks, what can we do? Here is your answer: http://farmdev.com/thoughts/71/googlebot-s-fatal-flaw-and-how-you-can-fix-it-or-get-rich-trying-/
Kumar McMillan on February 12, 2009 12:55 PMI think many folks are missing the picture that Jeff is painting here. I agree that Google and Microsoft are very different beasts; furthermore, they developed their monopolies in very different manners. However, monopolies in and of themselves are not inherently evil; the evil lies in the potential for misuse.
From left field...
Let's say I have a website that sells widgets, and I'm not the only seller of these widgets. When you Google for these widgets, my website is in the top three results; and I receive 83% of my traffic via Google searches for these widgets. Now let's say that by some unhappy circumstance, I run over Larry Page's puppy, accidentally, of course (... who doesn't love puppies?); however Larry doesn't see it that way. He thinks I'm the lowest of the low, and the monopoly he wields could be used to destroy me. How? One flag in the database, next to every record with my name on it, and www.mywidgets.com never shows up in a Google search again. I don't know about others, but my company can't survive on the 17% that's left over, after my buyers go to the other company that Google displays when a search for widgets is performed.
And that's the evil part. Not that Google engages in this kind of activity, but the potential is there.
A more realistic evil...
Google could bias searches toward products that Google favors because they receive bigger kickback through pay-per-click or advertising on those products. For example, (and this is completely hypothetical) it's entirely possible that upon a search for spreadsheet, Google could remove MS Excel (Office) and Apple Numbers (iWork) from the results in order to push the 83% of the populace they influence to Google Docs. Not necessarily because Google wants people to use Google Docs (it's not a product they sell), but because of some recent high-dollar deal for banner ads on the Google Docs pages.
Like I said, monopolies are not inherently evil; it's the potential for evil in their misuse.
code-ronin on February 13, 2009 1:50 AMThere are multiple differences between Google's situation and that of Microsoft, many of which have been already noted in other comments.
But I think the biggest difference is a matter of timing. Google is still very new, it is not yet clear whether their monopoly position will last for decades or be ephemeral, and they are not yet doing a lot to irritate their customers.
However, they are making an effort to lock in their monopoly and weaken Microsoft's (see Google Docs, Google mail, etc.)
In and of itself these tactics aren't very troubling, but this can lead to a slippery slope and a lot of enemies, and/or legal problems a decade or so down the road.
My advice to Google would be to concentrate on Search, protecting your monopoly by being head and shoulders better than the competition, rather than spending so much time and energy on diversification efforts that aren't making money and appear to be nothing more than ploys to lock in customers and weaken Microsoft.
Ben Johnson on February 13, 2009 2:45 AMGoogle offers a lot of free and good services for webmasters. No wonder they dominate the search engine market. Yahoo is making now some moves into the right direction with their BOSS and Search monkey apps.
Vauman on February 13, 2009 6:19 AMI'm having trouble feeling much sympathy for the poor abused advertisers google has by the throat. I don't go to the web for advertising.
Alex on February 13, 2009 9:53 AMI'm a bit late to post, but would like to emphasize one aspect of this that most folks don't think about enough. Google has been slowly and quietly expanding into other business models, and we are now seeing them begin to edge out advertisers who compete in those areas.
I work for a travel comparison engine that provides an easy-to-use, simple search service to users. We've been buying ads on Google for years. The ads have always converted well, and the site has always worked great for our users. Yet recently, Google has claimed that sites like ours don't offer a 'unique' or 'helpful' enough user experience, and therefore we're going to be priced out of advertising with them.
Why would they do this? They claim it's to enhance their user's experience and offer only the most relevant results, but it's pretty obvious what's really going on. Over the past few years, Google has been showing a little travel comparison engine of their own, embedded in their search results, when users search for simple travel terms like 'lax to jfk'. It's clear to those in our industry that Google has finally decided to wipe out any competitors that use this same model from their search results. In a sad attempt to try to hide their true intentions, they're claiming it's all about cleaning up their search results and offering better options for users. Even though what we offer apparently works great for our users and our clients, Google doesn't seem to care about that.
I'm not saying search engines don't have the right to filter results and decide which types of sites offer the best experience for users. But if Google wants me to believe that's what they're doing, they should let their already-well-established bidding and rating systems determine which sites work and which don't, not categorically decide 'this business model must be wiped out' when that model happens to collide with a Google product.
Google has made a monopoly on web search, which means they are now, for all practical purposes, the gateway to the web. As they branch into other businesses, they have total power to squash their competitors by not allowing users to see them. Is this an 'evil' practice? I'd say so. Is it illegal? I don't know, but it definitely doesn't feel good to be at the mercy of a giant like Google.
KDog on February 13, 2009 11:22 AMGoogle lives in a glass house. They don't want to throw stones, so this is a mute point.
ozone on February 13, 2009 11:42 AMOne thing i have noticed is that gmail is getting harder and harder to use in IE 7. It is just plain slow and works bad (a change that happened shortly after chrome was release). seems like google is trying to run MS out of the browser market (which should be a good fight)
Andrew on February 15, 2009 7:50 AMWe developed a software solution to downscale google traffic, which was starting to have an impact on performance. For example, we could limit google requests to an 1 second interval, or to arbitrary intervals, and respond with Temporary unavailable headers, which google crawler should support.
In the end we still decided on an alternative solution, we just scaled out our servers to cover the amount of google traffic coming our way. We didn't want to be penalized for shaping google traffic in any way, so we just sent the traffic to their own instance not connected to visitors.
The reason for increased google bot crawling is in part due to usage of google analytics. Other crawlers use page parsing to get the links of the resources that need to be crawled. Google gets their links also via google analytics.
In other words, if yahoo wanted to index more content, they should develop a statistics package which can work concurrently with google analytics (or not even statistics, minimally you would only need a piece of javascript which takes the current link and reports it to yahoo). That's the only way i see, that yahoo can become relevant as a search engine again. I probablly didn't do a search query on yahoo atleast for five years.
Sometimes, the question is not about good or bad, it's about what gives you the advantage, and whats the price for that advantage.
Tit Petric on February 16, 2009 4:40 AMI dont' know if this right place to post this interesting fact. hope others can enjoy this.
If you search the word search (no quotes) in google and just press 'I'm feeling lucky' you are redirected to www.live.com.
Hmm. Interesting.
continue same on live.com. we dont' have lucky button here but the first result it shows is 'search.yahoo.com'
ohh, now what yahoo thinks who is best for search - google again ?
no one believes they are first :)
Its a scary but very realistic thought. I personally love Google, as a search engine and as a company. But we have became so dependent on it that I know people that are unable to imagine how the internet was even usable before the G era, some others just believe that Google has been there since the beginning of time. We would become internet-crippled without it now.
In the other hand, who wants to compete with Google anyway? I read an article that stated that MS Live developers used Google as its search engine: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/158/1025158/microsoft-workers-prefer-google
Google also provides MS specific content search: http://www.google.com/microsoft.html
So they are the good guy but apparently a very tough one too.
I shiver in fear of one day finding out that a bunch of kamikaze hackers manage to take down Google for an entire day. I better see brimstone and fire raining from a red sky.
Chepech on February 17, 2009 8:38 AMIt may be that most people already use google.com as their homepage, and by default they are coming from google, when in reality they are typing it right into their address bar. You may want to factor that into the results. I'm sure it will only alter the results slightly. I agree google kicks ass, why hold it against them ?
google is cool on February 17, 2009 8:50 AMif the guy running the show is consistently giving me outstanding software that legitimately improves the quality of my life, for free, then why the hell wouldn't I want him dominating the market?
...*my* Big Brother is a goooooooood Big Brother, it's ok...don't worry...
Orwell on February 17, 2009 9:35 AMIn the beginning there was Alta Vista, and it was good, but for some unknown reason they did case sensitive searches. I told them this was very, very stupid and they told me I was very, very stupid because that's how people like to search; they like to be precise. Of course they did eventually switch to case insensitive searchs but the damage had been done; they were clearly idiots and the world knew it.
It's like when I called Circuit City and tried to buy a TV but they couldn't tell me how long it would take to ship it until AFTER I had actually purchased it. Since my buying decision hinged on the time span for delivery. I was TRYING to give them my money and they couldn't be bothered to even TRY to help me give it to them. I TOLD them that was a stupid policy and would cause them to go out of business and I was right.
So, what I think we should all take from this is that you people need to just do what the hell I tell you to and stop damn arguing with me...
Mitur Binesderti on February 18, 2009 8:46 AMWhy is the word 'monopoly' in inverted commas. In the fucking article you linked to you might want to re-read this section:
Judge Jackson issued his findings of fact[11] on November 5, 1999, which stated that Microsoft's dominance of the personal computer operating systems market constituted a monopoly, and that Microsoft had taken actions to crush threats to the monopoly, including Apple, Java, Netscape, Lotus Notes, Real Networks, Linux, and others. Then on April 3, 2000, he issued a two-part ruling: his conclusions of law were that Microsoft had committed monopolization, attempted monopolization, and tying in violation of Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act, and his remedy was that Microsoft must be broken into two separate units, one to produce the operating system, and one to produce other software components.
Note that his remedy was overturned on appeal, though his conclusions still stood.
Colossal Squid on February 19, 2009 6:19 AMKDog: I investigated, and keep in mind that Expedia and Orbitz are listed in Google's search results for the exact keyword you used.
Yuhong Bao on February 19, 2009 12:20 PMadd up the fact that google is a huge company , and there's no way to keep that philosophy for long...
No one is perfect, and I am sure there were some cases where Google really did do evil, but there are many more cases where Google seems to have done evil, but really was not Google's fault, for example, and these are the ones I really hate.
KDog: Google for seattle, washington, you will see Google Maps at the top. Google for 1+1, you will see a calculator at the top. See the feature of Google they are talking about? I personally think this feature is helpful. And Expedia and Orbitz are listed.
Yuhong Bao on February 20, 2009 7:22 AMPlus, even with this feature at the top, the rest of the results are ranked normally.
Yuhong Bao on February 20, 2009 7:25 AMAlso, notice how this feature, when used, looks clearly different from normal search results.
Yuhong Bao on February 20, 2009 7:43 AM@Alex: The point isn't whether you like sponsored links or not, the point is that Google is actively limiting choice, and people should be aware of that and be questioning their intentions. They can do this just as easily for organic search listings, and have now proven they are WILING to.
@Yuhong: Similarly, the point isn't whether Google's integrated tools work well or not, it's that they are actively locking out sites that have just as much right to compete in that space.
KDog on February 20, 2009 9:40 AMThe problem is Microsoft is not innovative in the areas
like search,they don't really care cause their
business is not completely search.
The most interesting question is: Is Google adjusting their search results to optimize ad revenue?
jafl on February 21, 2009 7:51 AMYou know your site (Stack Overflow) is succeeding when it is used as a verb in reference to search. You're right up there with Google.
For instance, today I see Leon Bambrick (secretGeek) write: ... I investigate. Dead end. I google it. ... (Google as a verb.) He goes on to write: Get more info. Investigate that. Dead end. Google it. Dead end. Stack overflow it: dead end.
http://www.secretgeek.net/lft.asp
Another question is how does the monopoly respond to threats to it's dominance?
Sun Microsystems is IMO a good example here:
http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/what_we_did
Is Google's monopoly such a surprise. The hidden fact about extremely successful tech companies (IE Microsoft) is its developers. Microsoft created a massively successful company pre-millennium and therefore gained many of the greatest minds in programming but Gates was also known to drive his programmers like slaves and treated them like crap.
Post-Millennium enter Google. They have awesome facilities, pay their programmers really well, create a great working environment for programmers to interact and share ideas. Not to mention that Google is based on sound principles. If I just graduated from MIT top of my class and I had offers from both Google and Microsoft where would I go... It's a no-brainer. As long as Google doesn't let their business be taken over by suits who want to corrupt their business model in favor of numbers on a spreadsheet, don't expect them to lose their position anytime in the next decade or more.
That top tier of the most talented and driven programmers is to technology companies what the silent majority is to elections. Nobody knows exactly what influences/drives their actions (except Google) but whatever side they join inevitably wins.
Microsoft had it but they're business model is morally bankrupt. Gates is not the reason Microsoft was so successful, their programmers and their ability to gobble up competing companies (and their talent) is.
That's why everybody but Microsoft who follows Microsoft's business model fails and it seems like the Google founders discovered a bag of magical pixie dust on the pot of leprechaun's gold at the end of the rainbow.
You can't hate the good guy who made the world a better place, but you can't help but to suspect him because in the real business world, he isn't supposed to win.
Evan Plaice on March 3, 2009 9:02 AMAs long as Google doesn't let their business be taken over by suits who want to corrupt their business model in favor of numbers on a spreadsheet, don't expect them to lose their position anytime in the next decade or more.
Yep, I know about the short-termism of Wall Street that causes this.
While it is not the only source of problems, now you see why Google decided to IPO using dual class stock to prevent this from happening.
Microsoft had it but they're business model is morally bankrupt.
Yep, unfortunately MS copied some of IBM's business strategies, such as FUD, and vendor lock-in. I think Ballmer is responsible for most of this copying. Compare with Sun Microsystems, which did the right thing (see my link to Schwartz's blog post above).
Part of the traffic data are demographic. As Jeff pointed out, a site geared toward programmers gets 350 times more traffic from google that any other search engine. I don't know to many (any actually) that search with Yahoo or MS Live. I do work wit a website that has a decidedly different domestic demographic and it receives a vast majority of it's incoming search traffic from MS Live.
I used to do residential computer repair and would estimate 30% of these folks did not know how to change their home page and, therefore, had MSN as the first thing they see when they get on the internet. While I do agree that Google does represent a majority of search engine traffic, we do need some perspective when discussing such things.
Jerry Gartner on April 8, 2009 8:07 AMDo you know what is really frightening?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4645596.stm
That Google admits in public that they are helping a totalitarian government brainwash 1/6 of the world's population and noone gives a damn about it.
Annonymous on June 9, 2009 12:45 PMAre you sure its that high of a percent? What timeline's your __utmz set to?
http://twitter.com/mildweed/status/2178655165
My site was sandboxed by Google for our political content. Overnight we vanished off the internet map, as if we had never existed.
Today I was talking to a major supplier for my business, and he said it's been well known Google will sandbox or sideline sites with a perceived anti-obama bias. That's astounding to me, and scary
I would not believed it had it not happened to me, but after posting one admittedly thought provoking article unflatering to the president, which was getting plenty of hits and attempts at malicious spam comments (which we blocked) we suddenly fell off the google radar.
Our readership went from 500 visits a day to less than 10 within 3 days. When I look at my stats in SiteMeter I want to cry. It looks like a cliff dive, and we changed nothing about what we do or how we post.
If we had been depending on that traffic to sell ads, we would be sunk, and many more conservative websites have been.
I too thought there was nothing wrong with Google's virtual monopoloy, because I assumed they were clean and fair..LOL. Sure, just the way Fox news is 'fair and balanced' it turns out.
It is extremely dangerous to have something as essential as an internet search engine be dominated by a company willing to use their position to exercise their pollitical points of view and police free speech.
After it happened to me, I realized they don't even need to shut you down...they just need to make you invisible, like pulling the card for a book out of a library's catalogue drawer, but leaving the book on the shelf. You get to claim the book is still available, although no one would think to search for it, or have any idea where it was located.
I cannot understand how individuals who were aghast at George Bush's moves to silence free speech, tacitly condone this kind of behavior because it's "right" and being done by their side.
Harvey Cat on June 23, 2009 5:04 AMI want Google to have a monopoly. There's a reason people use it. They do things right.
Alex on February 9, 2009 10:23 AM
________________________
My site was sandboxed by Google for our political content. Overnight we vanished off the internet map, as if we had never existed.
Today I was talking to a major supplier for my business, and he said it's been well known Google will sandbox or sideline sites with a perceived anti-obama bias. That's astounding to me, and scary
I would not believed it had it not happened to me, but after posting one admittedly thought provoking article unflatering to the president, which was getting plenty of hits and attempts at malicious spam comments (which we blocked) we suddenly fell off the google radar.
Our readership went from 500 visits a day to less than 10 within 3 days. When I look at my stats in SiteMeter I want to cry. It looks like a cliff dive, and we changed nothing about what we do or how we post.
If we had been depending on that traffic to sell ads, we would be sunk, and many more conservative websites have been.
I too thought there was nothing wrong with Google's virtual monopoloy, because I assumed they were clean and fair..LOL. Sure, just the way Fox news is 'fair and balanced' it turns out.
It is extremely dangerous to have something as essential as an internet search engine be dominated by a company willing to use their position to exercise their pollitical points of view and police free speech.
After it happened to me, I realized they don't even need to shut you down...they just need to make you invisible, like pulling the card for a book out of a library's catalogue drawer, but leaving the book on the shelf. You get to claim the book is still available, although no one would think to search for it, or have any idea where it was located.
I cannot understand how individuals who were aghast at George Bush's moves to silence free speech, tacitly condone this kind of behavior because it's "right" and being done by their side.
Harvey Cat on June 23, 2009 5:06 AMI'm not a professional analyst, and my approach here is pretty back-of-the-napkin. Still, it confirms what those of us in the search industry have known for a long time.
yuyy on July 3, 2009 10:13 AMProbably because Google isn't out there badmouthing their competitors, litigating former customers and registering bogus patents.
On top of that, there are zero lock in effects in the search markets. I could switch search engine, or my browser could do it for me, and I would be none the wiser.
It is an important difference.
Data portability in web apps, however, is a another story alogother. Market dominance there would be a potential problem.
Jonas on July 19, 2009 2:36 AMthe next frontier is local mobile search, which nobody has quite worked out yet. except the only way for someone other than Google to win is to call it something other than search. Microsoft has a chance if they call it Explore since they already own that word in a marketing sense...
otherwise, when someone thinks search, it's Google-- hell, they usually say Google! as long as Google keeps giving us the page we want in the top 1,2,3 results, how could that mindset possibly change?
jlarson on February 6, 2010 11:13 PMI can tell you exactly why Google doesn't get the angry mobs that Microsoft got. It's because the freetards don't have a vastly inferior open-source product to tout as an alternative while claiming to be the victims of unfair business practices.
Aaron G on February 6, 2010 11:13 PMGoogle search is a middle man. And it turns out to be very easy to cut out the middle man if he fails to connect users to providers. In fact, pre-Google most people cut out the middle man by using browser bookmarks. Post-Google, I stopped using the bookmark feature of browsers because it's easier and more portable to type a keyword into Google. Modern browsers automatically do the lookup for you. So instead of a stackoverflow.com bookmark, I just type stack overflow in a search box and get transported to the site automatically. I don't even need to stop at a search page and see the ads anymore. If Google ever made itself undesirable (by making stackoverflow.com disappear, for instance), I'd change or cut out the middle man. Google could lose its search monopoly over night.
The point to start worrying about Google's power will come when it develops products that become monopolies themselves. For instance if 50% of email addresses ended in gmail.com, we might have problems. In those cases, Google is a provider of a service, not a middle man. That's why Wikipedia is a more troubling monopoly in my opinion.
Jon Ericson on February 6, 2010 11:13 PMGoogle made me change my website to render in their monopoly browser. To get emails from the GMail system, I had to install gExchange, which forced me to install gAD (and join the Google forest), which forced me to change the DNS servers. Now Google says I should ditch XHTML/CSS and use some gLight thing.
Does the fact that Google's products are mostly free and ad-supported somehow exempt it from the same scrutiny?
After much consideration, Mr. Atwood, yes, in fact does. In my book, if the guy running the show is consistently giving me outstanding software that legitimately improves the quality of my life, for free, then why the hell wouldn't I want him dominating the market?
My point is that a monopoly is dangerous stuff, no matter how or why it came about.
Fine. But you must see that the danger of a Google monopoly is totally different from the danger of the Microsoft monopoly. Google is the fourth search engine I've used as a default. (Preceded by Yahoo directory, Web Crawler, and Alta Vista.) It wasn't that hard to switch. All the desktop machines I've ever used have run some version of a Microsoft OS. I'd love to switch to something else, but it ain't gonna happen soon.
Honestly, Google gets me answers to my questions as quickly as I'm able to type them in. And it seems to have very efficiently routed traffic to Stack Overflow. How is that a bad thing?
I would say very similar situation applied for many many other websites. Google is the best source of both organic and paid traffic. I'm using Yahoo and find their search results quite accurate, as good as Google's but I guess nobody cares about the search engine war now. Search means Google and googling means searching. It is disturbing and they're the biggest brother.
Son Nguyen on February 6, 2010 11:13 PMI agree with Max, Google has many great products and the best thing is most of them are free. I find them better than paid alternatives sometimes. Besides, They don't trouble us advertising much as yahoo and MSN does.
So, i don' think these results are innaccurate, i didn't use any other search besides Google (except for when it comes to torrents :D). So is my gf i guess.lolz
-HG
Hashan Gayasri on June 9, 2010 9:14 PMThe comments to this entry are closed.
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