Will Google Reign Forever? The ‘Rise and Fall’ of an Internet King

How many of you use Google all the time? Let’s get a show of hands. Let’s see…one, two, three, four…looks like a lot of you. Great, but maybe you should ask yourself why.

Why do you automatically turn to Google when you need to find information? The answer is probably habit. When you need to find something, Google just pops into your head.

However, new comers like Cuil, Trooker and Exalead want to break out of that bad Google habit and it only takes a quick stroll around any of their websites to see why Google won’t reign forever as King of the Internet.

How many of you know where that search engine that you look to for information on a daily basis, actually came from? How many of you actually care where it came from? No hands this time? That’s what I thought. But you should care, because it’s important, so pay attention…you just might learn something – like how and why Google’s going to be dethroned as King of the Internet Search Engines. But you’ll need a little background first.

Google got started – like most great inventions do – with a normal guy who had an idea. He told a friend about it, and then there were two guys working on the idea. Oh, and the fact that he was in college and doing this for his thesis, and had the help and support of an advisor and a school, and had access to all sorts of books and technology, didn’t hurt. His idea was to create a search engine based on a page rank algorithm instead of how many times a word was used on a page. What a novel concept. At the time, it really was. No one else had actually done that, and it paved the way for something big.

Larry Page (the guy with the idea) and Sergey Brin (the friend he told about the idea) were the original founders of what became Google – based on a misspelling of ‘googol,’ which is a number made up of ‘one’ with one hundred zeroes after it…but you knew that, right? Sure you did. Page and Brin based their idea on the logical assumption that a page with a lot of links to it about a particular topic, must be relevant to that topic. That completely made sense, so why had nobody else thought of it already? Easy. Because they were too busy saying Web pages should be indexed based on how many times a search word appeared on the page. This is also important, but not as much as it turned out, as the page link thing.

It didn’t take long for Google to get huge – enormously huge – and basically take over cyberspace. Google now runs more than half of all searches on the Internet; more than Microsoft and Yahoo! put together. Improvements are always being made to ensure that Google is as fast as it can be, and as accurate. It runs off of a big cluster of el-cheapo computers. One drops dead? No problem. There are a bunch more waiting to jump in and answer your query. To Google’s credit, it does let them replace parts without having to shut the whole thing down. Now that’s smart.

But have you figured out the head-fake? Google isn’t actually searching the Internet! No. It’s searching its own indexed and cataloged databases (three copies worth) with hundreds of computers at a time, so it can give you your results in 0.25 seconds. Where else can you get something worthwhile that performs that quickly? Nowhere, that’s where. Oh, and when it’s searching those databases, Google’s looking for character patterns, not words, so if you’re in a hurry and fat-finger something it will politely take the time to suggest what you might have been trying to say while it’s pulling up anything that matches what you actually said.

Contrary to the misguided beliefs of some die-hard fans, Google isn’t the only search engine out there. Yahoo! and Microsoft are the two other big search engines, and they want to merge. Google is trying to stop it, but the key is that Google really doesn’t care. It knows it can beat what’s been termed as a ‘Microhoo.’ It beats both companies on their own consistently, so only the misinformed would think that it can’t beat them if they’re together. Sometimes, a whole really isn’t more than the sum of its parts. Google’s interest is in slowing down the merger so it can make a lot of money off of people who won’t be trying the ‘new’ company because it doesn’t exist yet. That’s also smart.
See, Yahoo! has a problem. It started out so promising, but it’s not Google, and it shows. Yahoo! is struggling under the weight of junk ads and click fraud, and it doesn’t offer everything that its competitor does. It’s like comparing apples and oranges…or maybe something less desirable. Apples and prunes?

Google, on the other hand, gets part of its success from the fact that it’s just in so darn many places. There are lots of places out there where you can Google, but you can’t Yahoo! – like over 130 different countries. Really! That’s a lot of places for a company to not be in if it wants to succeed. Clearly, Google has the upper hand when it comes to moving into countries and getting its name and its capabilities out there.

As it stands now, Google is still the main source of internet traffic. When it comes to SEO, it is a good idea to keep this in mind. This may not be the case for long however. Remember, anything is possible on the internet and it is important to keep an eye on the future.

We’ve had this big talk about why Google is so great – and it really is pretty great – so why say it’s going to be dethroned? Because there are greater things out there. As soon as they catch on, Google will go the way of Yahoo! – not gone, but mostly forgotten. As an example of what’s about to step all over Google, take a look at a search engine called Cuil. It claims to search three times as many pages as Google. Why? Because Google, cool as it may be, isn’t keeping up! It doesn’t update as fast as the Web grows. That’s why it won’t stay king. Kings have to keep on top of what’s going on in their kingdom, and Google hasn’t been doing that. Without that vigilance, it’s going to be left in the dust. That’s already starting to happen. If you go to Google and your search results are hazy, it’s probably the dust cloud left by Cuil and others stampeding by.

So, what do the new kids on the search engine block have that Google’s missing? Lots. Visual searches that are, well, just stunning. Content-based searches that are relevant to the real world and not based on (a) how many keywords you’ve stuffed your page with, or (b) how many inbound (pagerank) links you’ve got. Faster Web crawlers. One hundred and twenty billion indexed pages. Oh, and they won’t save your user data and do stuff with it. They index the Web, not you. It may take a while – after all, Google didn’t conquer the ‘net and earn the crown overnight – but Cuil, Exalead, Trooker and many others, have made it past the moat and are scaling the castle walls.

Sources:

http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/04/a_microsoftyaho.html

http://scobleizer.com/2008/02/04/what-you-all-are-missing-about-google/

http://news.cnet.com/new-search-engine-cuil-takes-aim-at-google/

http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/113485

http://www.trooker.com/

http://www.exalead.com/search

http://www.naffziger.net/blog/2007/01/03/134-countries-where-you-can-google-but-you-cant-yahoo/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google

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