Any organism that grows will eventually die. Human beings, animals, plants, civilizations, revolutions and empires will eventually perish.
Businesses are not different. Even the now mighty Google will NOT be there at some point in time.
Great empires and civilizations at their height seem unassailable. The notion of them not being there seem ridiculous.
But eventually it will all come to an end.
Death of these giants doesn’t happen suddenly. It happens gradually and signs of decline go unnoticed and these giants are usually in denial of their decline.
If we look back in history there have always been signs that the decline – the descend – has begun. These signs seem so insignificant at the time – enough to ignore it.
World War 1 and 2 was the start of the decline of the British Empire. The decline of the Ottoman Empire started after they experienced several economic and political set backs.
Is Google on the slippery slope?
This giant is happily marching on. It is one of the best companies to work for and its revenues are continually soaring. A world without Google seems to unimaginable now. I am sure its world domination will continue for few years to come.
The likes of Yahoo, AOL and other search engines did not see Google coming. I don’t think even Google knew how big it would grow.
With virtually NO competition can Google be knocked off its spot?
There are some signs that it could happen …. One day!
Google depending on a single source for its revenues is its biggest weakness.
This giant gives most of its services for FREE and its only revenues come from advertising. (We are not talking about Mobile phones in this blog). Pay per click is its main revenue source. In order to be a dominant player, Google makes sure its advertisers are attracting highly targeted and qualified traffic.
In order to provide highly targeted traffic to its paying customers – Google pushes the boundaries – in getting to know more about our behaviour and sells our information to its Pay per click advertisers.
With sophisticated algorithms and tracking systems, Google has a pretty good idea about how we behave.
The line between privacy and user purchase behaviour is tested heavily by Google. Most of us are uncomfortable – but – tolerate Google.
Google is also becoming unpopular for NOT paying enough tax in many counties.
One day its paying customers (PPC Advertisers) could start looking for better alternatives and higher return on their investment and drop Google in masses.
Google dictates what it wants (just like a big brother)
– It sells our information to make money.
– It dictates how Gmail customers should use Gmail and changed its structure, because Google thinks it knows best.
– Google’s “personal Search”, distorts your search by what they think you want and who they think you are. That is, when you search for something, the result you get will depend on your past searches as well. Your Big Brother Google knows more about you than you!
There aren’t enough big players in the market to knock Google off its spot
But there are small – very small – search engines that are emerging and starting to take small bites out of Google’s pie.
One of them is a search engine called ‘DuckDuckGo’. DuckDuckGo is very small. But is “serving the crack” left behind by Google on its way to world domination. DuckDuckGo gets about 40-45 million searches a month and is has shown growth of about 500% each year for the past few years.
DuckDuckGo is a hybrid engine and have their own crawler but also use a bunch of APIs from other sites, both for link results and instant answers. They don’t use Google as a source due to privacy issues.
What I like about DuckDuckGo is (even the name is great!) that I get all the benefits of a fantastic search engine without my privacy being compromised.
– DuckDuckGo does not record your searches
– DuckDuckGo does not give you search results based on what you searched before (i.e. it does not personalise your search based on
… Who you are
… Your previous search listings
… Your click listing (likes etc…)
– DuckDuckGo attempts to filter out spam and content farm as part of their search. The idea is that the we get better search results.
Is DuckDuckGo a real threat to Google right now? I don’t think so. But there are going to be others like DuckDuckGo in the future who will be chipping away at Google’s dominance!
Guess what my new default search engine is?
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