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How Google Always Gets it Right
(4 votes, average: 3 out of 5)
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Google is, undoubtedly, the ‘Giant’ of the World Wide Web. What originally began as a research project back in 1996 by two Ph.D. students has now grown into a full-grown enterprise. Who’d have imagined that a research project in the Stanford University would actually go on to become on of the Internet’s most essential products?
Back then, the founders claimed to have indexed around 25 million web pages, an astounding figure during those days. Today, although the company keeps mum about the exact pages in its search database, some analysts believe it to be somewhere over 25 billion. However, the size of your search index is no longer the deciding factor in this age, as we have already seen a while back. Cuil, a product by some of Google’s employees failed miserably, even when it claimed to have an index bigger than Google’s.
To me, the most important factor that I need to see in a Search Engine is the relevancy of the search results. And then comes simplicity. And not surprisingly, Google achieves both these factors. In March 2008, when we took a look at the Hitwise statistics for the search engine market in USA, Google lead the pack with a 67.25% market share of the entire US search. Yahoo search controlled 20.29% share while MSN search lay low with 5.25% and ASK.com search received 4.09%.
Hitwise have again released statistical data and as it turns out, Google now holds a whopping 70.77 percent of all U.S. searches. Yahoo’s share fell down to 18.65% while MSN and Ask.com settled with 5.36% and 3.53% respectively. Google’s market hold has shown a remarkable rise over the years gone by and has increased 10% over the same month last year and 2% over the previous month.
The question to be asked here is, why are the others failing miserably? With newer and newer technologies coming up, why are search engines like Cuil, Mahalo and Blekko not gaining popularity? If a new era of Semantic Web almost here, why isn’t Powerset in the news for the right reasons? And most importantly, what is Google doing right?
There is no definite answer to that. Although I’d personally credit Google’s success to its simplistic approach. Take a look at Google’s Home page as it is today.
As it is clearly visible, nothing much has changed on the homepage compared to the first design, back in 1996. The primary goal of anyone who visits a search engine is to find what is looking for. As Don Reisinger rightly says, a search engine only acts as a middleman, not the destination. A search engine’s only goal is to let a user search what is looking for, and then provide him the relevant results. And Google precisely holds the correct nerve. The search box is located in the dead center of the page. The page is not cluttered with any other junk, such as ads. Commonly used links are strategically placed at the top of the page. There’s also the interesting ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button. When a search is made, the search results are neatly categorizes as Web, Images, News and so on.
On the other hand, Yahoo takes a ‘portal’ approach. The homepage is filled with all kinds of information, making is very difficult to separate out what you are looking for. Yahoo! does have its ’search engine only’ located at http://search.yahoo.com , but the average Joe would obviously visit yahoo.com the first time.
One of the other major reasons for Google’s dominance is its easy availability. Google ships as the default search engine with most of the popular web-browsers in the market, and even through mobile phones. As the popularity and usage of these products increases, so does Google’s.
Lastly, Google has an army of other Web Service which are equally popular among the masses. Google bings all these services into a single user account - ‘Google Account’. It this becomes easy to navigate from one service to the other on the fly, saving you the troubles of entering the login credentials all over again.
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Please have some standards it is hitwise not hotwise and you guys are really loosing out with bad quality of posts. Rajiv please start blogging again
For me the sole reason behind Google extraordinary success is the sheer simplicity of it’s interface and use. Also, they have a brilliant pool of brains handling all aspects of the company
Thank you for pointing out that error to us and your kind words. Rest assured, Rajiv will be around before you know it.
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Hey abhishek.. Thanks for the kind words.. my right hand is hurt so can do little blogging. Wrt preshits post to be fair to him he has done a great job given his time at WATBlog.. when i had 50 odd posts i couldn’t blog half as well as him.. Im sure your feedback will perk him up to do even better. Keep reading WATBlog and ya ill be back soon.
I think Google is poular because of the timing of its launch - at the cusp of internet revolution. People have got used to the best available engine at that time. Any new engine launched today has to cross the entry barrier - user’s habit. For e.g QWERT keyboards are the most popular ones even though people claim there could be many other configurations which are superior BUT people are used to QWERT…
Before you comment back about the existence of other engines at that time (Yahoo etc), Google used to give the most relevant search items much better than others like inktomi from Yahoo etc.
I agree that simple to do interface would also have helped it, but even if you launch a search engine with the similar interface today it may not succeed.