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With Yahoo's purchase of Inktomi having some speculating that Yahoo will dump Google as it's search provider, and Microsoft wanting a piece of the action, I'm thinking that Google's glory days are behind it.
Not that they will die off like AV or anything. Just that some big guns have taken notice of Google's success and eventually Google's market share will diminish. I'm all for a more crowded search engine market place.
Google should go public now while they are still on top ;)
The masses don't have a clue if Inktomi is broke, AV is "spammy", or Google has "de-googled" themselves..
I get tired of WebmasterWorld'ers thinking the rest of the world is "focused" on the SE's like we are...
More are than 5 years ago, but the majority are still like minnows in a "huge" pond..
They are happy they have a good connection tonight, and their search for "new cars" yielded a few car sites worth looking at..
I would bet even the majority of Yahoo users, won't have a clue, when Yahoo changes up their results.. They'll think it's just a "new" look to Yahoo.... :)
I think the average web user who searches becomes very aware of the Google brand. The fantastic amount of publicity they get, plus the viral marketing, has paid off enormously.
When was the last time you heard about a girl "Inktomi-ing" her prospective date?
User will tend to go where they get the best results. Should Yahoo replace Google with Inktomi, people will use it but they will be comparing what they see with what they had from Google. I have a lot of faith in web users. Often, they know what's good.
If Yahoo had intentions of droping Google and putting up Inktomi in it's current form, I think they would have done it by now. My guess is that while everyone has all eyes on Google, they are working quietly in the background on improving Ink.
Certainly if Google starts coughing as it is doing now.
Even more so as IMO, Inktomi, AV and Alltheweb are more and more copying Google-type results, increasing their index size and fresh crawl/indexing.
With that they were able to get a unbelievable branding. With all that monstrous success of Google the one thing that really stands out for me is their top position in global brand recognition.
But: that doesn't mean they have the best results. Frankly Google hasn't seriously improved their algo for years. ATW, and also INK and even AV on the other hand have made huge steps forward.
So now just like with Pepsi there are other players who are just as good. Does that convince people to change? No.
People don't change for no good reason. As long as Google doesn't make any mistakes and continue to work on their brand I don't see the masses changing easily.
[edited by: mfishy at 12:28 pm (utc) on June 10, 2003]
I get tired of WebmasterWorlder's thinking that the rest of the world is so stupid that they cannot even tell the difference between whatever search result they are fed.
I hear non-webmasters talk about searching on the Internet all the time. Maybe it's my age group - late 20's - but many are quite aware of what they expect out of a search but have no idea what HTML is.
Google is obviously having huge problems right now, and the SERP quality has slipped mainly due to old pages still showing up and lack of many new pages. BUT, Google is still very far ahead of ATW and INK in terms of search quality.
Think a lot complain about Google spam here? Wait till when, and if Yahoo uses ink. :)
BTW, Heini, I respect your opinion but you are not suggesting that INK is as good as Google right now are you? Have you searched on INK? It's like a random script generating pages :)
Imagine a document centred Windows rather than the current application centered version - you don't click on a browser but on a document or a document search. If decent results were returned then users may not see the need for all the extra clicks to go to Google. Something like this might really take off - and all that Google could do is sue M$ and after 4 years of wrangling just pay a 750 Million dollar fine for unfair competition.
Having said that I don't think M$ has made any real innovations for years and they seem to misunderstand the non-corporate user - so Google should survive.
The problem however is being on par with the leader is not enough. You have to be better if you are the challenger.
