Some search industry pundits have expected Google market share to come down a bit as other search engines catch up in terms of the quality of their results. Microsoft in particular has been considered a threat due to their aggressive investment in search technology. Even AskJeeves has been rebranded as Ask.com and is being promoted using television ads. Well, it turns out that the inevitable slide in Google’s market share wasn’t quite as inevitable as some thought. Recent statistics described in a CNET News article, Google’s market lead widens, show the opposite is happening:
Google’s domestic market share rose to 42.3 percent in February, up from 36.3 percent a year earlier, ComScore said.Yahoo’s search market share in the United States fell to 27.6 percent from 31.1 percent a year ago, while Microsoft’s MSN fell to 13.5 percent from 16.3 percent and Time Warner’s America Online fell to 8 percent from 8.9 percent.
Only Ask.com saw a small gain, from 5.3% to 6%.
What are the implications for the search industry? Perhaps they aren’t profound - after all, when your competition’s brand has become synonymous with the activity (today, people don’t search for information about you, they “google” you), one can expect built-in resistance to change. Still, Google’s gains have to be a bit scary for the folks at Microsoft and Yahoo.
One of the challenges facing would-be Google dethroners is that search results are actually fairly good these days, at least compared to the past. Certainly, some topics remain a bit spammy, but most people tend to find what they are looking for. There’s less incentive to change, making brand-switching less likely. Microsoft even tried that time-honored incentive, a contest that awards prizes to searchers on a random basis, but so far this seems to have had limited impact.
Where do Yahoo, MSN, and Ask go from here? First, they need to keep working on quality - if there’s any perception that results are worse than Google, individuals who try them out won’t stick around. Second, I’d be cautious with rolling out dramatically different results displays. While the next leap in search may indeed involve new ways of clustering or displaying results, there’s an implicit risk in that approach. Google has succeeded with a remarkably clean and simple interface, and people have learned how to use it.
Simplifying the search interface is key for portal sites like MSN and Yahoo as well - when one arrives at Google, there’s one focus on the page, the cursor is pre-positioned, and one can type a few characters and search. Visit Yahoo or MSN, and one is presented with a screen with dozens of elements - just finding the search box may take a second or two. Yahoo does a bit better, with a large and clearly labeled search box and pre-positioned cursor. MSN has its search function in the same location, but the text is reversed out of the page border color and the cursor isn’t in the box. (Of course, if you go to search.msn.com, one gets a clean interface, but how many people would type THAT URL in?)
As far as marketing, I think Microsoft and Ask.com are on the right track with their approaches. Ask’s television ads, combined with a great domain name, could get some people to try them out. And Microsoft’s contest is actually a good way to build not only sampling but repeat usage. The key in Microsoft’s case would be to put some real marketing muscle behind it. With the advertising dollars at stake in search, it would be worth it for Microsoft to launch a really major contest - one that worked for all searches, not selected ones. Perhaps users could accumulate points with each search (remember iwon.com?), or prize links could be randomly inserted into the PPC results as they are in the current contest. That’s not a bad way to train people to click those results, too.
Of course, Google won’t remain a stationary target. They continue to roll out services at a frenetic pace while still devoting resources to improving search quality. The next frontier is probably behavioral search enhancement, and Google is well-positioned to capitalize on it.
Some think the efforts of the search dwarves will be futile. According to the CNET article,
“We see little to stop Google from reaching 70 percent market share eventually; the question, really, comes down to, ‘How long could it take?” RBC Capital Markets analyst Jordan Rohan wrote in a research note Tuesday.
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