Eh, what's the point predicting that Googs will "fall" in 4-5 years? What matters is that RIGHT NOW they are king of the hill. What are you going to do, SEO all your sites for 4-5 years in the future??? The premise of this thread was foolish to begin with.
Yeah you know, for someone who is supposedly in the SEO business, I've seen "seoindia" ask some pretty noobish questions on this board.
Google has spent a lot of time and money getting the phrase "google it" into television shows and movies. It's like a new version of product placement. Pretty smart on their part, I think.
It's like English people saying "I've got to do the hoovering" or "Can you xerox this for me..." This is what most marketing people dream of for their product.
I had a discussion about this with someone here a little while back. We weren't entirely sure if Google was the one who paid for all the references to them, or if screenwriters/TV writers just picked up that the word "google" is funny and ran with it, and it just snowballed after that. Now, those Apple laptops you see on every movie is definitely product placement. But those lines about Google and "google it"? I personally think it just sort of caught on, and became a phenomenon.
From my experience Google is the hardest to work with from the site admin point of view. MSN is the fastest at getting new pages indexed and Yahoo is the easiest at submitting new sites for directory inclusion. From the Searcher point of view I still find Google to be the best. However, their recent moves into other areas of the online arena make me wonder if their are losing the search focus that made them the industry leader.
While I understand the worry about that happening, I don't think it will in Google's case, at least not in the foreseeable future, and I don't see any evidence of it to this point. I think we need to remember that as they get richer and richer they are also expanding their "bench", adding new talent all the time.
The whole thing is more and more about branding. People use google as a verb, but Yahoo makes more money. Normal people have absolutely no idea that each SE returns almost totally differnt results. And they don't care. They get the information they're looking for, or they get their own little weather report and movie times, or the search box came bundled on the machine. Most people have no idea really, and it's only people who hang around boards like this that really care about and notice relevance. It is not nearly this frustrating or important for everyone else. That's too bad.
I was about to post something along these lines, but thought it better to check out the entire thread before doing so.. When Google came along, Altavista was god, as you rightly said! In reply to the original post, think on this. Gogle get just under 50% of the search traffic, so how come they can deliver around 80% of web referrals? They are hardly crap are they? Yahoo also gets roughly 50% (they are both late forties in reality) yet Yahoo mostly delivers 20% or less. This makes Google four times more effective in my mind anyhow.
Very well said. Exactly my feeling. For my sites, Yahoo isn't even number 2 in terms of traffic. Most months it's about fourth in line.
some sites get 70-90% of traffic from Google. This doesn't make google more effective in delivering traffric. Sandbox makes most of new sites get zero traffic while a small percentage of old sites get lot of traffic.
i think there are many that simply don't want google to be so mega-huge ... i found this entertaining for all you conspiracy nuts like me - http://mccd.udc.es/orihuela/epic/ols-master.html
I don't see Google losing the race anytime soon. Google is still the popular search engine regardless how easy it is to get ranked in msn. What matters is what the people want, and Google gives it to them more than any other search engine on earth. Many web industry people get mad at Google, but that is because of the business we are in. Overall Google is improving and continuing to provide everyday people with what they are looking for, and that is what keeps them on top