Has Google Lost the Plot?

Part 1

As a web developer and webmaster of the www.celtnet.org.uk website I have a vested interest in the way that search engines work and operate. A recent article in the Economist Newspaper indicates that the market share of the various search engines is as follows:

Google: 50%
Yahoo!: 28%
MSN: 13%
Ask: 6%

Google has more market penetration that this, however, as it tends to be used by more 'web savvy' users who are far more likely to buy products on-line. Indeed, the popularity of Google grew out of this community because Google at the time was seen as 'best in classs'. The results returned by this search engine were better than those of its rivals both in terms of the accuracy of the results delivered and the total number of sites and pages indexed. With its search algorithm and its page ranking facility Google delivered both the most and the best results. Even after its stock market floatation Google was basking in the rosy glow of how it was perceived by its user base. But does this view of Google still hold true?

Since its stockmarket debut Google (in common with many other large companies cf Microsoft) has been adding new and often quite different products to 'supplement' its core search engine business. Some have criticized this as an example of a large company straying from its core business. However, Brin and Page, Google's founders, have calculated that Google's engineers should spend apout 70% of their time on core products, 20% on relevant but tangential products and 10% of their time on the wildly fun things that might (but probably won't) lead to a product.

As a result a large number of tiny teams within Google have been working on all kinds of different products. However, many webmasters see this as Google not caring about their core business any more. In fact this is a view that many in the investment sphere now share and Google's share price has been rather volatile of late. Indeed, the view is held that at floatation Google was a fairly simple story: in effect they were a marketing company deploying online ads on top of the most popular search engine on the internet. Now, however, Google looks rather like a mess and comparisons are being made with Microsoft during the mid 1990s where they had a single core strength (Windows OS) and were churning-out a string of rather poor me-to applications.

For example Google Video has been trumped by YouTube and Google News lags far behind Yahoo! News. Google's instant messaging offering lags far behind AOL's Yahoo!'s and MSN's offerings. Even Google's slogan of 'Don't be evil' is looking faintly ridiculous as they use their status as a 500lb gorilla to stifle the growth of web-based developers and entrepreneurs.

Over the past few years Google has almost certainly offered the best search engine experience on the internet. This is significantly due to Google's search and indexing algorithm. The problem now is that Google actively regard themselves as the best and this has coloured their attitudes at all levels and represents one of the reason that they don't seem to have a clear strategy for the future and are currently dabbling aimlessly at a variety of non-core projects. This over-confidence has also led Google to have what might be viewed as an almost-religious faith in their mathematical algorithms which means that there is almost no human intervention as to what gets indexed and why. For Google the important thing to know about a website is how many incoming links are pointing to it and a website's overall rank (its Page Rank) is directly linked to the number of incoming links. This is great for old websites on popular topic, but if you're a new website in a specialist niche your indexing and rankings will suffer as a result.

This is why Ask (formerly Ask Jeeves) is employing a different track. They also use incoming links to rank web pages but they also cluster sites and pages by theme. Thus rank isn't absolute as it's measured with respect to a site's or a page's comparison to its peers ߞ an approach that often returns better results than Google's. A cursory comparison certainly suggests that Ask's general web search is at least as good as Google's and it's searches for maps and images are currently superior. As a result Ask is gaining a small but dedicated following.

The potentially really big player in this arena, however, is Microsoft who are weighing-in with their MSN search engine. This is not as good for searching as Google, but has indexed more of the web (for example Google has indexed 86 pages from my site but MSN has 1100!). As Microsoft tweaks MSN's search abilities this product may well offer a very strong challenge to Google. After all, Microsoft has a tradition of entering a marketplace rather late with a fairly mediocre 'me too' product that gradually improves until it prevails. Moreover, MSN will be including an on-screen search box in its next operating system Vista that will be pre-configured to search MSN as a default.

The search engine wars are definitely not over and in tomorrow's article I'll be looking at Google's relationship (or rather lack of it) with their main content providers, the webmasters. Return here tomorrow for the second part of this article.