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Can Anyone Compete Against Google?

This article mainly discusses the research a market- research firm called Millward Brown conducts yearly to determine the economic worth of the world’s largest brands. The main focus of this article was Google and whether it truly is the leading search engine in the nation. Some of the most recent reports value Google at more than $100 billion. Ironically, Google makes its most money from ads(about 97%), yet rarely advertises itself. Its high reputation has garnered it such world-wide fame such that companies like Microsoft, and IBM find themselves constantly spending enormous sums of money just to stay on the people’s radar. This increasing competition other companies are facing because of Google is forcing the less competitive companies to band together. This article states that in July 2009, Google’s largest competitors, Microsoft and Yahoo decided to join hands and attempt to dethrone Google as the world’s best search engine. Google is also experiencing problems in other areas such as email and office programs such as Google Docs, phone systems and Web browsers. Google’s expansion into every field is increasing its competition with Apple as well.

However the article believes that at the moment, Google’s biggest problem is Microsoft and its new search engine Bing. Over $100 million dollars has been spent to market this new search engine. Microsoft advertises Bing everywhere and makes suggestions that Google doesn’t work anymore and rarely leads to the correct search result. Bing even claims themselves to be a ‘decision engine’ rather than a search engine.  According to Anna Patterson, a Google engineer, it was one of the first times anyone competed with Google for so long even though it results in a loss of a lot of money. However, Google never expressed any concerns but rather poured money into hiring the brightest engineers to improve the company.  One of the features they are attempting to improve is the “I’m Feeling Lucky” option on the home page. Microsoft is using Yahoo! to expand their network and direct all Yahoo users to Bing thus leading to a potential expansion of 26% according to this article. However Google denies this claim and believes that their superior quality of proprietary algorithms gives them the leading edge.

According to users of Google however, Bing does not hold as much appeal as it is shown to have by Microsoft. Google users believe that an inaccurate portrayal of Google is seen through Bing ads. Overall the main message delivered by the CEO’s of both companies is the following. Eric Schmidt of Google claims that their strategy is to ignore Bing and just focus on making Google better. However, a potential problem is the Google is losing their feel as it expands into phones and operating systems. Steve Ballmer of Microsoft says that it needs to find a big revenue generator and that Bing could help soften its image because most people never liked Microsoft.

The overall relation of this article to the course is the use of advertisers and search engines and hubs and authorities. The most expensive investments for advertisers are advertising in the most sought after hubs. However as more and more engines link to a certain page, the page rankings go up. Generally the more popular hubs are the most expensive to advertise on. For example the massive investment Google makes in its employees and products directly influences the amount they must charge advertisers for putting up their ads. Another example is Bing’s searches. These searches point to a lot of diverse articles which then point back to Bing (example Yahoo engine) giving these websites a good hub and authoritative score. At the moment it can be seen that Google is a more popular search engine than Bing is and is thus valued more. Whether Bing surpasses Google in the future is all dependent on their effectiveness in advertising and people’s willingness to change and use this new engine. Thus the popularity of certain engines is dependent on the number of people who use it and thus drives the price up as more people use it, just as talked about in class.

– Nameless

Source: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1917712-1,00.html

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