One more data point on the dominance of Google. Jan Goyvaerts compared Microsoft AdCenter and Google AdWords, and found that Google delivered *TEN TIMES* more ad impressions.

http://www.shareware-beach.com/2006/11/microsoft-adcenter-first-impressions/

That's not a competition. It's a sixty-to-nothing blowout, a college football team attempting to play a pro football team.

So is this really an issue? Huge monolithic companies seem to be the way of the future, some low level competion, but it is like Apple and Microsoft. Altavista and Google. Dell and Gateway. One to rule them all, and hopefully not bind them all in darkness.

Google's dominance of being the front door to the entire web, is the very reason that it is a useful tool. Two sides of the same coin.

No, it's not good, regardless of how much better Google is than anyone else. And it is equally not good that after all these years no one else has matched them.

It may just be me, but when I search for certain things I get a result set that is not as good as it was some years back -- the same question over and over in various forums, etc. Perhaps that is a function of a "larger" web.

I had made a resolution to use Ask.com more often, but it's hard to break old habits...

"If It's Not in Google, Does Your Website Really Exist?"

It doesn't if your site is a technical site, like JavaLobby, as a lot of techno-nerds use Google fairly exclusively. But I've found that most computer novices use MSN, AOL, or Yahoo as their search engines because either those were the defaults or they became the default when they installed software (like AIM or Yahoo Messenger or MSN Messenger).

So if your site is about the latest celebrity gossip and Google nixed you from their index, I think it would have an impact, but not nearly as profound an impact as on JavaLobby.

Five short years ago, the monolithic search engine of the web went by a different name. But then someone built a better mousetrap.

I use Google as a default search engine because it produces good results, and is non-intrusive. If it falters in either of these critical customer-satisfaction areas, some other search engine will quickly rise in popularity.

If you see this issue as a power struggle of coporate giants, then why hasn't Microsoft made anywhere near the progress they'd hoped for?

If you see the issue as countless consumers holding all the power, and simply choosing the service that serves them best, then the rise and fall of Yahoo!, the rise of Google, and the inability of Microsoft to make headway all make more sense.

Please, Google hardly carries the power to completely erase a website from existence just because it drops the site from the index. Yes, it is arguable that Google may be a big driving force of traffic, but ultimately it's your fault as a webmaster if that's the case.

If you have to get over 70% of your traffic from people searching for you, I would think that's not good enough publicity. It's weak strategy to rely on a search engine to drop people on your doorstep. It certainly helps, but it shouldn't be the source of 70% of your traffic.

Further, Google isn't the only search engine out there. They hardly have a monopoly and they hardly control whether or not your website is seen. Yahoo, MSN, Altavista... there are plenty of alternatives out there to get your website on a search engine.

I call it poor planning to rely so heavily on just one.

Google may not be the only search engine out there, and may not be the only way to drive traffic to your website. This does not alter the facts, however, that many many businesses happen to have extremely large volumes of their traffic driven to them through Google search results. It's just the nature of things these days. Businesses don't necessarily choose to have Google drive most of their business, and sure there are ways to infbutuence change should they choose to, but sometimes one is at the whim of the world...

<i>It may just be me, but when I search for certain things I get a result set that is not as good as it was some years back -- the same question over and over in various forums, etc. Perhaps that is a function of a "larger" web.</i>

I agree. I think it's because Google is such a large slice of pie now that people spend a lot of time and effort getting to the top of that list. So instead of getting there on merit, sometimes the top results are there because of gaming the algorithm.

<i>If you have to get over 70% of your traffic from people searching for you, I would think that's not good enough publicity. It's weak strategy to rely on a search engine to drop people on your doorstep. It certainly helps, but it shouldn't be the source of 70% of your traffic.

Further, Google isn't the only search engine out there. They hardly have a monopoly and they hardly control whether or not your website is seen. Yahoo, MSN, Altavista... there are plenty of alternatives out there to get your website on a search engine.

I call it poor planning to rely so heavily on just one.</i>

Google giving you 70% of traffic isn't because of poor marketing, relying too much on one search engine, etc, etc. It's because THAT'S how much traffic Google drives.

Google accounts for 50% of searches
Yahoo accounts for 24% of searches
MSN accounts for 10% of searches
AOL accounts for 6% of searches
Ask accounts for 2% of searches

(source: http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2156451)

Google is that much more popular than the competition.

dang, italics got stripped when I was quoting.

Anyhow, Jeff had a really good link in the article. Google gets credited with 40-50% of search market share but almost everyone who looks at their traffic reports would say Google is responsible for more like 70-90%.

http://www.skrenta.com/2006/12/googles_true_search_market_sha.html

this is a typical american reaction to any one entity having this kind of control.

To conclude from this post that JavaLobby is doing a poor job at marketing its site is erroneus. Many of the searches that lead to JavaLobby are the result of a search for a subject that happens to also exist in one of the articles posted on JavaLobby. Should JavaLobby pay adversiding dollars for each article/phrase or keyword on its site?

Guys, keep things in perspective. Google isn't housing information that no one else has. It's just a better "phone book". There are lots of different type of phone books out there, and they are all happy to put your number in for free. If one decided to do something screwy you would see everyone jump ship and go to the next one. Everyone loved the iPod, but now it is starting to get some competition for the zune and iRiver. It's the nature of the beast, everyone has their favorite and as long as that favorite doesn't screw you over, you will continue with it as your favorite until something better comes along.

The reason we don't get results like we used to years ago is that the WWW is tremendously bigger and Google has indexed who knows how much more of it than say ask.com.

Nothing's making me think JavaLobby deserves all this sympathy. They neglected their site for weeks after spammers attacked it, and now Google has "punished" them by protecting the rest of the net from their lax security. It even took them hours, apparently, to fix up the forums once they discovered the problem. Short explanation: they're just not much good at running forums.

It really is a non-story.

This isn't really a big deal. Yes, everyone gets to your website through Google. No, they don't have that much power because of this.

Everyone uses Google because they were first to market with a decent search engine, and nobody has any reason to switch. If Google abused this power (by delisting legitimate sites without cause), the press would pick this up, and soon people would switch to Microsoft, Yahoo, etc. Google may have market share, but in this case it just doesn't translate to market power as much as you might think.

Clearly in the case of JavaLobby, the majority of their traffic was spawned by Google searches for help and related articles. This should be a big indicator to them that while the content may be useful, the dynamic isn't great enough to keep their brand on a users mind and browsers pointed to their site.

"But I'm not sure I'm comfortable with a single company having such near-absolute power over the sum of all information on the internet, either."

Ok, but what is there to do about it? If MS search or Yahoo were much good, Google's dominance wouldn't be so complete. Unless you've got something to replace PageRank, you're probably just going to have to live with discomfort...

ask.com is powered by google :)

I think the difference between (the good) Google and say, Microsoft (the "evil empire") is that Google didn't rise to power by creating a mediocre product and then forcing everyone to use it by abusing the power of their initial monopoly position. Indeed, as someone noted above, Google was *not* the first major search engine - that belongs to AltaVista and Yahoo. Google rose to power, in the face of competition from much larger companies (the aforementioned AltaVista and Yahoo), by offering a superior product. Really, this is the free market working the way it is supposed to work (as opposed to the Microsoft case, in which a monopoly used its power to break the free market system.)

Moreover, I think the nature of search engines is such that, if Google's product were no longer superior, it would lose its dominance in the market just as quickly as it gained dominance. It's *very* easy for a consumer to switch search engines, unlike switching operating systems.

Google aside, Jeff, I think this is really a larger question.

If I'm a really smart guy and I don't take advantage of anyone at all and I build a great machine, a really great machine... so great that everyone wants one, should I be penalized for it? If I do something so much better than everyone else that I effectively control any market, whether that market is a commodity or a luxury (video games, pet collars, access to the internet, lobster bibs) is it okay to come in and tell me that I'm too good for the collective good and I have to stop now?

I would argue that that kind of attitude stifles innovation. If I am going to go out and build my mousetrap, I intend to take it all the way... not just far enough that the regulators don't notice me.

I say huzzah for Google and huzzah for Starbucks and huzzah for Microsoft (when practicing ethical business). The USA attracts the best of the best because this is the country where one can rise to the top on merit.

I hope the worlds brightest people immigrate here and build the best and keep our star shining. If the rest of the world catches on, or forces here stifle our innovators, the USA will fall by the wayside... and deservedly so.

I manage the website and traffic for voicebroadcasting.us and the same thing happened to them. It was catagorized nicely among the needed keywords, then the site got hacked, poof... site vanished. I found the site doesn't return back to rankings as quickly as the article discusses. Its been over 90 days and the web spider bot hasn't visited the site yet.

Google sure is the front door to the internet. Also TinyURL-like services are notable, because they have loads of traffic going through them. People use TinyURL to shorten long URLs into tiny ones, so people visit TinyURL home page once in a while too.

There is a dictionary in Google, but I can't find a direct link to it in the Google home page google.com google.com/dirhp

The easy way out if Google decides to become Godgle is the semantic web; distributed crawlers on that as of yet fictitious technology would be the End of the Enterprise Search. Or we go back to messages in bottles :)

Just wanted to note the irony: I found this discussion via the Goog-Meister...

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