I Agree With Jason On This (or rather he agrees with me)
I read that Jason Calacanis thinks Google will have 90% market share in search within the next year. I don’t know if it’s going to be 90%, but I do think that Google’s share of the search market (at least the english speaking search market) will not stop climbing.
I said this on Feb 4th, in the wake of the Microsoft bid for Yahoo!:
Let me start this post by saying that I don’t think Microsoft will
achieve its goal of obtaining some sort of balance and scale in the
search market with an acquisition of Yahoo! If you look at the share
of search that Google has had over the past five years, it’s an ever
increasing line. I think that line will keep increasing, year after
year, until Google has all of the search market (at least here in the
US and the english speaking world). I don’t think there’s much that
Yahoo! and/or Microsoft can do about it.
Jason and I disagree about a lot of things, but on this one, I think he’s spot on.
Comments (Archived):
Google has over(!) 90% marketshare here in Germany for quite some time now.The only point why this doesn’t scare the sh*t out of me is the rise of the social media infrastructure (blogs, memetracker such as techmeme, delicious etc) and that making plain old search reduntant in a lot of places.
Marcel: agree with you on social media (although what will things be like in a year, after OpenSocial has settled in?)Fred, you quoted a prior post:”Let me start this post by saying that I don’t think Microsoft will achieve its goal of obtaining some sort of balance and scale in the search market with an acquisition of Yahoo! “I can’t help but to think that both of them know that and that it’s Y!s other offerings like del.icio.us, its media content, code base, etc. that make (or made) it an interesting acquisition.
As the world moves toward mobile gadgets and phones, and factors such as relevance and context become more important, the question that rises to the surface; “Is search going to be the core function for monetization of the mobile device”. The question is not who gets 90% market share from search, but is that an area that can be effectively monetized going forward in a highly mobile world. I believe that search is a tiny sliver in the total pie of the time spent on a mobile device.Recent blog posts and articles such as http://tinyurl.com/2sbebp reveal certain advertisement metrics which are really shocking; Response rates of 0.04% (on SNS) compared to a 0.2% in general on the web. Does search carry a higher metric? How can numbers like 0.04% to 0.2% be an acceptable number for ROI for those who spend money on advertisements on the web.One industry executive put it right when he said, “its really hard to make money when the click through rate is that anemic”. What does this mean for search?
I think search is powerful for both the user and marketer and will remain soBut I also agree with you that new forms of attention aggregation and information and entertainmnet consumption are emerging which will compete with search effectivelySo you are right, even if google dominates search it doesn’t mean they will dominate the internetFred
On one hand, Google is working very hard to find ways to expand their business, and improve the experience of searching. I would guess that they’ll do a good job on this, and stay ahead of everybody.On the other hand, the world of the Internet and WWW is still moving very quickly, and the rules of the game can change in ways that are impossible to forecast. You just never know what’s going to happen next.