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Many here have pointed out they are mostly garbage. We're these planned to be integrated all along, or were they integrated as a reaction to Bing?
Fading Home Page
Come on... Was this designed and planned well in advance, or was it a reaction to Bing being way 'cooler' than Google... (I have an idea Bing may be 'the choice of a new generation'(or one of them), because I actually didn't use it until a high school student said they tried searching for something on Bing and Google like it was expected for them to use both.)
Search by Submitting a Photo
Sounds like the use of some technology Microsoft developed I read about not too long ago, but don't remember where to cite the source. (Maybe someone else can shed some light on what it is. It had to do with Micorsoft's SilverLight technology.)
Jazz Interface
Long-term plan, or as Brett says, Bing Envy IOW a knee-jerk reaction?
Personalized Results
People are against behavioral ad targeting, do they really think people want what are essentially behavioral search results by default?
Honestly, I think Google's started reacting rather than leading to some degree, because they're are definitely getting 'out cooled' by Bing just about every step of the way...
And what's even more interesting to me is they're not being chased by some start-up or someone they can buy out. They're being hounded and chased for market share by a company that crushes them in annual revenue and already has a worldwide user base, so I think they're going to have to keep doing it to keep up with the revenue pace they've set for themselves, because there's not much room for Google to go anywhere, except down...
Matt Cutts used to say when he asked people what they liked about Google they often said it was simple and easy to use... Maybe he should have been asking what they liked about the competition instead?
2010 could be an interesting year in the search market, me thinks.
My prediction is that Bing will have the majority of search by July 1st.
I think that's a little ambitious.
But, I'm seeing Bing more and more on TV, Commercials(verizons) and if Apple puts it on the Iphone, the writing is on the wall for Google.
...there are no indications to suggest that any significant traffic shift to Bing
You're looking at the wrong tree. The significant traffic shift is Facebook. Six months ago, they were #3. They're now #2, ahead of Yahoo, and close on Google's heels. Facebook will become #1 in the next few months.
Facebook draws people in and they stay in. The audience is not longer surfing the web; they are moving to social media and staying there.
You're looking at the wrong tree.
I don't think so. Facebook will diappear like all the rest of these flavour of the month websites.
Facebook draws people in and they stay in. The audience is not longer surfing the web; they are moving to social media and staying there.
Not true; actually in no way does that even make sense in my opinion.... Facebook isn't a search engine and having friends answer .php questions on facebook, in no way whatsoever, is grounds for facebook replacing search engines. Youtube has the 2nd most searches after google, and again, is irrelevant because it reall isn't a search engine.
My initial point was - the fact that Google is slacking big time right now, especially in the eyes of SEOs, is having a big impact on the faith people have in google.
When you make a living by SEO, and the most poular and most used search engine (google) is the majority of what you optimize for and also the ONLY thing that over half of your clients even give a sh*t about as far as rankings are concerned - it's a HUGE deal.
In my opinion, google bit off more than they can chew and for all we know "caffeine" may never even workout.
When people decide to switch search engines, it's not something that happens slowly over a period of time. It happens instantly.
If Googles new "real time" results begin delivering junk results due to people exploiting the feature and spamming, it will only be a matter of months before people tell others to "use bing instead"... Once somebody realizes some of the cool options offered by bing, they may never go back.
Here's just a few nice features offered by Bing:
-built in calculator.. Go to bing and enter any mathematical equation into the search bar and bing returns a result. ----> (3x5)8.5+8.5(10-7) and instantly you get and answer as the first result..
-type "what is" or "define" before any word or term and the first listing is a dictionary definition.
- the ability to track packages by simply entering the courier followed by the tracking #.......
I'm sure there's a ton more too.
Anyways, I dont want to ramble on anymore - I'm just saying that Bing is still very young and for google to be f*cking around with caffeine at a time like this could easily help sway searchers toward Bing.
If google wasn't scared, they would not have decided to try and improve their whole system immedietely after the release of Bing.
Without being biased (i do like google better) I really thing that Bing is more impressive. It has complete potential to take a big share of googles traffic and they know it.
How can facebook be compared with search, when facebook isn't a search engine?
It's not the "search", it's the traffic that matters.
Facebook is now the #2 website in terms of traffic. It has been growing steadily. It passed Yahoo a few months ago. It will pass Google and become #1.
And everything will change. No more "Make my site #1 in Google!" It's "Make us findable in Facebook!" There's no meta-tags in Facebook.
It's fundamentally different from Google. Facebook isn't about people finding pages. It's people finding other people and similar interest groups.
This doesn't mean it will get better. Facebook has worse corporate ethics than Google (yes, I know, that's pretty hard to beat.)
2010 will be an interesting year.
And everything will change. No more "Make my site #1 in Google!" It's "Make us findable in Facebook"
Quite honestly I cannot ever see this happening.
Also, facebooks business model is pretty bad.. Go to your profile and you can barely find your fan pages. For as much as they promote themselves, they sure don't deliver.
Before there was facebook, there was myspace. And before myspace, there was probably something else.
Post about the current status of your relationship, or what you had for dinner, or whatever. It's not a community it's a gossip fest for attention wh0res.
You just described Twitter and look how popular that is now.
And before myspace, there was probably something else.
Geocities?
Quite honestly I cannot ever see this happening.
It's ironic that you make this statement, as earlier you asked "what took Microsoft so long?"
You basically paraphrased what Bill Gates initially thought about the internet and specifically SEs like Google.
Don't make the same mistake Bill Gates did (and he could afford to -- a billion times over).
We may not "get it" NOW, but as others pointed out,
one can't ignore the 2nd most visited site in the world and blow off what it COULD be in 3-5 years.
one can't ignore the 2nd most visited site
But something is going on there...people are spending their online hours in ways that they didn't used to spend them.
The difference is that they are spending hours not spending money.
The difference is that they are spending hours not spending money.
This is a simplistic understanding of what happens. For a few items, yes, there is a simple Buying Cycle model: Someone suddenly gets the idea to buy Lady Gaga's latest; they search, they click, they buy.
But for most products, there is a complex and long Buying Cycle. People realize they want things, but that realization was created by advertising and branding. Social relationships such as friends, peers, family, and co-workers all are part of this.
Social relationships (I'm not using the word "social networks", because you'll instantly think of online social networks) are by far the most significant factor in marketing and sales. A Forrester chart shows Word-of-Mouth has the highest trust when people decide what to buy (at the very bottom of the list: blogs. Yep, all that effort on blogs is mostly wasted.)
For the last ten years, we've focused on last-click attribution because it could be measured. Just like the joke about the little boy who looks for his quarter under the street light because that's where the light is, Google gets too much credit for sales.
By combining analytics, tracking URLs, and context parsing to social media, we can now track word-of-mouth. You can track what people in Ohio and Texas are saying about your brands and who they're saying it to. This finally casts light into how brands are actually seen and propagated by people (previously, only very large companies could afford polling and focus groups).
Many of you say "Facebook doesn't show dollars." Well, of course not. Word of mouth doesn't show dollars either. But it's the majority of the factor on why people buy your products. If you have bad (or no) word-of-mouth, a big SEO/PPC campaign won't matter, because people won't seek you out.
That's why Google has finally switched around to supporting brands and down-grading non-branded companies, vendors, etc. People prefer trusted brands by a wide margin (we worked with a large analytics company: they found unbranded terms get a 4X ROI and branded terms get a 12X ROI.)
People use Facebook to build relationships with their friends or their social communities. Luckily for marketing, that's trackable. They're not just "spending hours online"; they're building social relations. Those relationships have the highest trust when people buy. At some point, they'll decide to buy.
Then they search in a search engine, see the ad, and buy. Do you see? Google is at the very end of the process and had little influence over the decision process. They already made up their minds to buy.
Giving Google credit is like the 22-year old sales guy at a car dealership: he thinks that it's his skills that get people to buy cars. People had already decided to buy before they entered the car dealership. They decided based on friends, co-workers, their experience with the brand, newspapers, TV, and many many other factors.
Learn the Buying Cycle: Awareness Phase, Research Phase, Purchase Phase, Loyalty Phase, Advocacy Phase. Learn how these work. Build strategies for each of these. SEO and PPC (along with SM, Social Media) can be used in all of these.
I'd say it's a bit of both, and mostly planned development, but it gets rolled out and announced at opportune times in response to the business and competitive climate. From the beginning, Google has been "all over the place" in what they worked on, a natural result of their 20% time. As the number of employees grows, so does the total number of hours and projects being cooked up in the back rooms.
How does some pet 20% project end up in production at Google? As I understand it, there's a strong peer review element, as well as some overall business guidance from management. But in contrast to many companies, not everything being worked up is always part of a grand plan. However, as I mentioned in the beginning, WHEN new things are rolled out, and HOW they get announced can be very opportunistic in the wider news cycle.
And yes, we do get some "very beta" roll-outs. Google has always had a reputation of rolling things out long before another company might and staying in beta for extended periods. There is also a strong "techno-geek" culture at Google that will give us new things just because they are technically cool. Then the market shows them whether there is lasting value or not.
So we've got a mix here. And the recent flood of new things from Mountain View gives us a look at both sides.
The buying process right now is very peculiar indeed - to grossly oversimplify, people make decisions on social networks (and offline), then go to Google, type in keywords and make Google money with quantifiable clicks. Google gets all the credit, nobody else does, so far so good. But there are no guarantees this "arrangement" for the benefit of one party is going to continue this way - and Google probably knows it.
Therefore, having realized the precariousness of this position, however enviable it may seem to outsiders, they are starting to throw away any pretense of not being evil: they want to get into literally everything before some other disruptor (e.g. Facebook) disrupts the current process, heavily skewed to Google's advantage (see Eurydice's "last trackable click" argument).
The question is, will they do more harm than good (to themselves) with these wild moves? I guess, their thinking - after a careful risk and benefit analysis, I am sure - is that nobody is in any position to challenge them and therefore, no rules apply. Being engineers, they are probably technically correct: most can't do anything other than find another job. But the new model they are so frantically seeking may not be found at all. And they're certainly not going to elicit any sympathy from anybody if/when they finally stumble.
They are not idiots and they understand this, too. That's why I expect Google to put their PR flaks into overdrive to convey to us the benefits (real or imagined) of them taking over everything on the Internet and scare us a little with how dangerous everything non-Google is. The only company you can trust, really. Also, expect a lot more air traffic between Washington and Mountain View - they'll really need a free rein here.
I get the distinct feeling that most people have had it with google. I have.
Why doesnt every site owner simply drop all mention of google and put links up to bing and yahoo - a mix. It would be easy to hype up bing to the masses.
I think it wont be long before every listing on googles page 1 is a paid ad.
Weve got to get shut of them before that happens.
[edited by: tedster at 1:13 am (utc) on Apr 3, 2010]
Eurydice
Google is at the very end of the process and had little influence over the decision process. They already made up their minds to buy.
In Google's defense: I think you're being too harsh. Google does innovate quite a bit.
So is Google reacting? or are we seeing planned development?
