Google’s exotic flavour signals that other search rivals are still far behind it.
With all the talk about Microsoft and it’s off-again, on-again talks with Yahoo! it is easy to forget that in the search engine world there is a single major player called Google and it is so far ahead of the game that rivals cannot even begin to imagine what they have to do in order to catch-up.
Google is clearly a redshift company not just using existing technology but challenging itself to create solutions for problems that appear insurmountable and find ways to do it before anyone else.
Just how exotic the company really is was glimpsed at the Google I/O conference where Google Fellow, Jeff Dean, explained a little of how the company tackles hardware failures across a server base that numbers over 200,000 servers and grows daily and 36 data centres which can be found using GoogleMaps.
While the conference threw a little light at the way Google datacentres actually work what it did, more than anything else, was to highlight just how different is the company’s approach to search from any of its rivals.
Microsoft and Yahoo! may eventually partner up, or Yahoo! may find shelter in AOL and Microsoft may pour huge amounts of money into developing its own search business. The success of all these ventures, given enough time and money is likely to be better than critics expect. The clear message however is that no matter how successful they are they are unlikely to beat their massive rival without also managing to change their business culture which affects the way they tackle everything, from online advertising development to the search business itself.
This means that for the foreseeable future if you really want your online business to succeed you simply cannot ignore optimising your site for Google first and everyone else second.
Does the Microsoft and Yahoo join-up failure indicate a new strength in online search?
As I write this the financial world is busy slaughtering chickens and studying the entrails for a chance to glimpse the future of search advertising on the web (and guide shareholders towards the acquisition of shares that will pay off handsomely).
After a great deal of breath-holding and online noise Microsoft publicly announced that it was withdrawing its offer for Yahoo! therefore abandoning its strategy to buy into Yahoo’s Panama online advertising model and acquire, at a stroke, its team of developers and engineers. While publicly Yahoo! claims it is ready now to focus on its online web strategy and Microsoft is ready to pursue its own line of development using its “talented team of engineers” by refusing to play along both companies have lost a great opportunity to create a viable alternative to Google.
In the process online searchers and webmasters have lost out equally. The first by being subjected to the same old triad with Google delivering user-friendly, ever expanding (and expandable) products that really deliver what the customer wants and the latter by missing out on the opportunity to choose anyone but Google for their online advertising.
I know that Google delivers. There is nothing wrong with that. But there is nothing wrong with having viable choices and real competition either and at the moment we have not.
So why can’t (or won’t) Yahoo! and Microsoft make much of a dent in Google’s hegemony. Whatever their press releases said and implied, Yahoo! historically has been a diminished force that has gone on diminishing. They were the first with the search technology Google has perfected and have managed to come second, at one point drawing all their search results from the Google database (!). Microsoft got into the online game because they were suddenly afraid that something big was going on they did not understand. – the point is (for both Yahoo! and Microsoft) their business culture works against them. Yahoo! sees itself as an entertainment company and Microsoft as a corporate behemoth that’s comfortable dealing with other corporate behemoths and dictating terms of service to small business owners. The web is about none of these. It is about delivering service, fast, expertly and with the minimum of fuss on an individual basis.
In that respect both Yahoo! and Microsoft have failed and will continue to fail while Google, which understands the mentality of the individual web user, will continue to make inroads, eating, in the process into the traditional corporate pies Yahoo! and Microsoft have always regarded as their own.
This is not to say that neither Yahoo! nor Microsoft are incapable of reverse-engineering anything Google does. Patent infringement notwithstanding they are and they will but they are bound by their very approach and their very structure to always play catch up and on the web, real winners always lead. It really is that simple.
This situation clearly needs to be cleared up so that
seo consultants can plan forward for the future.