Google has over the years diversified from being a just a search engine to a digital media products company. Also over the years the importance of search and its use as a window to the world has increased incredibly. So much so that people instead of giving their business cards say “just google me!”.

The dominant position that Google commands today puts it in the shoes of God as far as digital media is concerned. Here are 7 reasons why this dominance should be feared by one and all.

Google Page Rank: Google page rank which is the fundamental way that google ranks pages on the web. It is a well known fact that google updates these rankings based on various factors. So one wrong step and you could down the drain as far as search results are concerned. Also google contributes more that 50% of your overall traffic then you could be in big trouble with a page rank drop. Google has information for webmasters here with regards to the do’s and dont’s for your site. Ironically google doesn’t allow paid links (besides for google ads ofcourse) and you should be very careful of link based ads on your site unless you want to get penalised by google on your page rank.

Google Adsense: A lot of small publishers daily bread is won via the adsense revenue and besides for the placing the code you have little on no control of the monthly revenues that you can earn via adsense. Publishers have seen fluctuations in revenues many a times. Even google has address ed the same on their blog.

Given the lack of any concrete alternative to google adsense several publishers are highly dependant on google for its bread and butter. A dangerous thing incase google tomorrow decides to change some aspect of its adsense policies which kills your revenue overnight!

Gmail – Recently there have been a couple of gmail outages which have left many people (including me), jobless as most of our emails are directed to a centralised account i.e. Gmail. Also most of our friends and work related contacts are also on Gtalk.

This level of high dependency on Gmail means our work functioning almost entirely depends on google and its mail services.

Google Analytics: Analytics the free traffic monitoring tool has almost become the standard metric for publishers and advertisers as far as measuring any sites traffic is concerned. Given the high dependance and credibility analytics enjoys among advertisers it would be a nightmare if one day your analytics stats were on a downslide.

It would directly impact your ability to quote traffic statistics for direct advertisers.

Google AdPlanner: Ad planner the tool for advertisers is similar in ways to analytics except that the tool is public. Currently adplanner does not enjoy a huge following for its statistics but with time it could become a prime lookup destination for statistics on various websites. Lets say adplanner doesn’t show great numbers for your site then you can very well forget advertising.

Google Search: Whether you do or do not say google me but people do google you. And again you have little on no control over what pages come up with regards to your name. In this case your personal reputation is at stake and guess what its in google’s hands. There have been several cases of companies spending dollars on seo companies because of a certain search result affecting their reputation.

Google News: Finally google news the aggregator which aggregates news from various sources. Its not difficult to imagine that the generations of tomorrow would be reading online more than they do offline. In online reading an aggregator like google news plays a vital roles as it provides multiple sources that one can read from but which sources it projects up and which sources are buried that is completely based on google.

Over time as a company, news agency you would give and arm and a leg to be on the first few results for google news search as it would have a tremendous impact on your readership/branding. In short google would control your fate.

Conclusion: Well those of you google lovers don’t get me wrong Im not anti google and I certainly hope that google abides by its “do no evil” philosophy but I also believe is that the size of market share that google enjoys in most segments puts it in almost a dictating position.

It also leaves many publishers at the mercy of google for their daily living. It also gives google the power to control the web in more ways that one and play the big daddy. Im not sure thats too much of a good thing as too much of anything is bad. And in this case too much of google could be bad.

To illustrate my point lets assume you had to go one day without any of google’s service i.e. search, mail, blogger etc how many of you can still surf the web and complete your daily work? Well you have your answer.. Is your life dependant on google? Well then be scared.. very scared..

PS: May be a no google day is required – A day when no one uses any of google’s services. It would also give one day to new services which might be good but havent been used/tested just because we are too lazy to change from google.

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