Google is going to die -- A discussion on Y! and MSN Beta.

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This is my code, can you explain a little more? I thought I knew what you meant, but when I tried it it messed up.

 

You can have my two cents with that thought as well, that is exactly what I was/am thinking.

While it is quite possible, I don't see it happening anytime soon, right now, if Microsoft thinks that they won't be able to kill Google, they have the money to buy them out a few times over... Currently, Google + Firefox + Everything is hurting Microsoft big time...

I'll express more of my opinion when I have some spare time later, now to go give most of the people in this thread reputation++

 

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There you go.

 

I dont see firefox as being effective, at least in the real estate industry.There are no mls systems that support firefox, only IE and I am sure this is the case within other industries.

As for IBM and google, well I dont believe that google will be able to weather the storm of the financial power that MSN has. Mr Bill didnt get to where he is at by letting smaller companies run over him. You mention there is security risk with MS OS sys. This is true, I am not expert but the only reason I see these security risk is because those that are taking advantage of these risk, know that there are more users using this OS system than any other. So they target MS users instead of mozilla users. Anything can be hacked whether it is MS OS or Mozilla OS. It just so happens that more people use MS OS than any other and those that are causing these security risk want to cause havic with the masses and not the few.

Even in googles system, someone has found a security risk. It doesnt matter what system or whos. Those that want to cause havic will target the system that the masses use.

Over the next year I predict that we will see the google stock drop like a rock. Investors will cash out leaving google holding the bag with all the new spending they are doing. Google has tried to grow to fast and spent to much money since their IPO and the only thing generating real income for google is adwords. Once their stock drops, google will be a prime target for a hostile takeover.

Then you will see someone like IBM or MSN come in and take over this company. Googles little 3 billion dollar company is nothing compared to the 300 billion dollar giant called Microsoft.

Lets also not forget about the law suits google has against them presently. One judgement against google and investors head for the hills. Google does not have the financial power MS does and one judgement could sink google, whereas MS has already weathered that storm.

I understand that with the traffic that google has generated some of you and the income it has produced for those running adsense, you dont want google to fall, but it is not up to us or google or even msn as to who is number 1, it is up to the consumer and consumers from my own polls are getting fed up with googles lack of relevant results and the difficulty in finding informative sites within google.

Google IMHO has forgot about the average consumer and MSN has seen this and is taking advantage of this. The average internet consumer barely knows how to send email and needs things that make their search simple.

We as website owners and webmasters in a sense have caused this. We try to manipulate results and google has had to answer this with changes in its system to combat our efforts. Google has forgot about the consumer and made this an us against them type search engine. IMHO

 

About the security risks, when you have a system as big as Google or Windows of course there will be security holes -- probably some almost unfixable as well, granted, a 4 line hello world program can be bugless, but a 40 million line operating system cannot.

 

When you are talking company values you must look at total market capitalization versus total market capitalization.

Not sales versus market capitalization.

OK here are the financial facts of life for IBM, Google and Microsoft.

Google has 1.5 Billion in sales, a current market capitalization of 51.4 Billion and a PE ratio that is not available at this time from NYtimes.com, all these figures were pulled from NYtimes.com business section.

Microsoft has sales of 36.8 Billion, a market capitalization of 293 Billion and a PE ratio of 36.8

IBM has sales of 89 Billion, a market capitalization of 162 Billion and a PE ratio of 20, which is more in line with reality versus Microsoft which is still overvalued.

Most shareholders are hanging on to M$ because of a 75 Billion dollar special dividend to be paid out to shareholders over the next 3-5 years, of which Bill Gates will receive more than 3 Billion dollars from this cash dividend payout because M$ is sitting on too much cash according to analysts.

Microsoft may well be able to buy both IBM or Google but the anti-trust laws of the nation would never allow an illegal monopoly to acquire either company.

You all seen what the EU just ruled against M$ did you not?

Thursday, December 23, 2004

 

When MSN is ready to make its move, they will take a big chunk of Google's market share within 2 years. MSN might not take the lead in overall share, but they will make it close.

MSN will hire an ad agency to develop a slick TV commercial with with a catchy jingle (think HP's new "Picture Book" commercial) and the average web surfer will start using MSN without really thinking about it.

I agree with Las Vegas Homes that Google employs the use of filter algorithms to keep some sites from ranking well, especially in real estate. I believe that their business model is to drive more AdWords revenue. But here's the ironic part: I notice that for most real estate PPC ads that the CPC for Yahoo/Overture is 2-3 times the cost of the PPC for the same keywords on Google!

What will MSN do with PPC? It's inevitable that they will eventually break away from Overture with their own PPC system. Will their SERP algo's then follow the business model of Google or Yahoo?

 

Well the SERP's past the first page were subject to a lot of things that many think have been fuzzy or are fuzzy and a lot of webmasters are pissed off because of inconsistency in Google SERP's.

Do they drive webmasters to buy ADWORDS with inconsistent results or have they done this in the past or are they secretly doing this now?

That is a great question and I think that most folks have seen some light on this.

But with Google sending over 95% of referrals to some (most) sites from search engines how can any of us bitch without being crushed?

How Yahoo and MSN take share from Google is a mystery because I see very little coming from either of them in my server logs.

There are hundreds of search engines out there, but if we are honest with each other I would bet that most of the referrals to most sites from search engines are coming from Google.

It is their game to lose, I have been pissed off at them more than any of you ever will be in the past, but if they are the only game in town we have to realize that we play with them or go out of business.

I see few referrals from MSN or Yahoo so what does that tell you?

Friday, December 24, 2004

 

The problem with a statement like this is that search engine traffic to a web site is based on two key factors, not one. Most people tend to think that SE traffic is based only on SE market share. But the component that they forget is relative SERP's for the same key phrases.

If I rank #5 for kw1 on Google and #88 for kw1 on Yahoo, of course Google will send me a lot more referals. But if I'm #5 for kw2 on both SE's the breakdown is more like 55%-45% in favor of G.

But that is probably too broad a generalization. Different demographic types (income, education, etc.) are probably using different SE's. I would love to see some data on this.

Yes, Google does get the larger share of SE traffic now. But a few years back the Bee Gees and Michael Jackson sold the most albums. Humans are fickle, and quickly flock to the latest fad or trends. MSN has the money and the marketing experience to start stealing market share from G, Y, and everyone else.

 

What do your logs tell you right now?

 

The answer varies with each of my sites. Some have G referals as high as 64%, some are split between G-Y-MSN at 30ish/20ish/10ish, and some are at about 30% share each.

One more thing - I think that SE traffic also depends highly on what people are searching for (products, types of products, information, resource materials, etc). I don't have nearly enough data of my own to form any solid conclusions on this, but I strongly believe it to be true (especially in conjunction with web surfer age and income demographics).

 

My logs say that MSN, and Yahoo both send me more traffic then Google -- and for WEIRD keywords.

However, I find I get WAAAAAAAAAAY more inbounds from various forums and direct (or no referer) links.

 

Advertisers and Publishers generally like Google, but at the same time they would all like to see some changes. MSN has the opportunity to capitalize on the flaws of Google. There have been complaints about bad customer service, lack of real-time stats, and strange Adsense terms of service policies (among other issues I can't think of right now). I don't think google is going to self destruct, but I do think they will be smaller than they are now. And for some reason I just want to use a smiley face because I never used one in a forum before

 

Yeah, by "Die" I meant more like what happened to Yahoo, hitting a deep slum for a whiel...

 

One important factor that I dont believe has been looked at is conversion. For real estate this is a very very important factor. For our websites the conversion of leads has been greater from MSN and Yahoo than google.

The leads that are converting from google are really not coming from google at all but coming from AOL. I personally find when looking at logs, it is mostly webmasters and our competitors viewing the websites from google.

I usually see bigger chunks of BW being taken from visitors from google than MSN or Yahoo. This leads me to believe that it is a competitor or webmaster breaking down the sites. I have some proof of this because of other sites we have found that have taken content or reversed engineered one of the sites and placed it on the web..lol.

When I compare stats from the SEs for kw1. MSN Vs Google it is a 45% msn to 55% google ratio. When I throw yahoo into the mix, we have almost a 2 to 1 ratio of traffic over google. Those figures will now change with 2 more sites in yahoo's top 10 and 1 other added in top 10 to MSN.

These figures may not be the case for a top 3 website for kw1 in google, but for just a top 10 site in google for kw1 these are the figures I have.

I predict within 7 to 12 months assuming MSN launches the marketing for the new SE in Jan. We will see MSN equal googles market share in 2005 and maybe pass them depending on how aggressive they get in the last quarter of 2005 or sooner if google has some negitive press between now and then from either a law suit on file or some other bit of information that may come to light.

 

It would be nice to see a higher % of visitors coming from MSN and Yahoo, but personally I cannot see either of these corporations coming close to Google within the next year simply because people, i.e users do not see them as a being search engine specific - I think you could say that they have "too many fingers in the pie" in that they offer too many services and people don't identify them as being a search engine.

I'd like to think that I would start to receive more referrals from MSN and Yahoo, but unless they spend millions on marketing MSN and Yahoo has being search engines I don't think that will happen.

 

I agree with WWHHomes - Yahoo and MSN's brands are both too diluted. The average user tends to go for simplicity and clearness of purpose. Google has both of these - Yahoo and MSN are very far from it. IMO MSN would be MUCH better off promoting their www.msnsearch.com URL than advertising the www.msn.com URL when plugging their search engine. People like Google b/c they know what to expect - and what they expect is a clean, clear, quick and easy search - without tons of not-always-relevant sponsored results, without all kinds of news articles and games and entertainment crowding the page, etc.

Users are happy with Google. IMO it would one of two things to swing the tide. 1) People become dissatisfied in general with Google's search interface or results or 2) MSN/Yahoo create a stronger search-focused brand. I don't see either of those happening at present, so while a new search technology is great for MSN, and it will hopefully improve their results, I dont see it making a large impact on their market share.

 

I disagree, Microsoft has the money (and the reasoning) to promote MSN in any way possible right now, they want to kill Google. The way I see it, Google is a threat to Microsoft in general, although, Google is not as rich as some people think, Google has the power to influence the web. Microsoft wants a monopoly over that power (again, IMO).

I have to agree with you on point number two (2. MSN/Yahoo create a stronger search-focused brand.) that really does need to happen. But, if MSN and Yahoo can each get over 25% of the search results (meaning the two of them together could cause a 'minority government' (canadians )) that would be good enough for me. I just don't like seeing Google as being the ONLY search engine targetted.

Another advantage to having each SE around 33%, would be that each uses a different algorithm, thus, SEO wouldn't be as possible (IMO, SEO is a bad thing for the end user -- de-relavanting search results) as it currently is. You'd basically have to target one SE, and SEO for only it, or don't do any SEO at all.

 

I agree. My sites are primarily information oriented and 70-75% of my traffic comes from Google (that used to be 80-85% though so it's declining somewhat). On the other hand, sites selling certain retail products or services seem to report more traffic from Yahoo which for me is less than 10%.

I don't think it's entirely demographic, though. I think it's because Google does a better job of returning relevant results for academic/medical information, as an example, and perhaps doesn't do as well for products and services. My guess it's an interaction between search engine "specialization' and demographics and the type of site.

 

Looking at my logs for the last week, these are the break downs of traffic.

Google: 32.47%
MSN: 31.17%
Yahoo: 27.27%

This site is on the first page of all SEs for KW1 and KW2. Since G IPO I have seen this become more the norm for our websites. These figures however do not calculate the addition of MSN beta. You can see that MSN isn't buying into the link manipulation that G is. Unless google changes at least in my industry for real estate and stops producing IMHO very bad results MSN will take a hugh share of market from Google.