Google’s long term competition; are they afraid of a cascade?
I recently read an article in the Washington Post about DuckDuckGo, a newcomer to the search engine market, that’s been gaining steam, and some of the giants have taken notice. But, what makes it different from the current search engines? DuckDuckGo has a search algorithm that focuses on the most relevant first few results, and answering questions that are searched rather than the tried and true method of just spitting back websites. But perhaps the most significant difference, and what may be drawing users in droves to the upstart is the fact that DuckDuckGo doesn’t track users. That means it doesn’t know your information it doesn’t tailor search results to you, and it doesn’t tailor ads to you. So then what would make Google name DuckDuckGo a competitor, this might seem perplexing considering DuckDuckGo averages only tens of millions of queries per month whereas Google has billions per day. This is why we have to examine networks to see the real reason Google would name DuckDuckGo a serious competitor—and why SearchEngineLand.com would name DuckDuckGo “the Biggest Long-Term Threat to Google.” In short Google is afraid of a cascade.
If the DuckDuckGo search algorithm is indeed better than Google’s PageRank, then that would be a direct beneficial reason to switch to DuckDuckGo from Google. Other direct benefit reasons for people to switch might include the lack of tracking, increased privacy, or less ads, however none of these are what would be considered a network benefit effect. A network benefit effect is an effect present in man networks, wherein the value of the good or service, in this case, Internet searching, increases with the number of people using it. So for instance if network effects are present and many people are using a product, it will become even more valuable. It is not entirely clear at first that a search engine would have network, but what if we look at brand loyalty, which can in some cases be a sign of network effects, we will see that search engines have much higher than average brand loyalty, up to 70% of users using one search engine exclusively. This alone doesn’t prove that there are network effects in a search engine so we have to look critically at search engines.
In many ways people are defined by the products they are using, for instance in computers, people often identify as a mac person or a pc person, including yourself in these groups can be thought of as a network, and just as there would be mac and pc networks, there are also search engine networks. By using a certain search engine people gain admittance into a loose network of people who supposedly think similarly to themselves. This network presents many benefits such as being able to identify with other people as fellow searchers, Googlers, Bingers, or perhaps DuckDuckGo’ers (though it doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as much.) Admittance into the network and these network effects mean that the more people that use a product the more valuable it becomes. Or in this case, the more people that use a search site, the more desirable it becomes to use for everyone.
A cascade is when a product reaches a certain amount of popularity, enough so that the network effects make it more desirable for everyone so more people use the product, the it becomes even more desirable, often gaining large margins of market share, or seeing rapid growth. This is precisely what Google is afraid of, DuckDuckGo reaching this crtitical value so to speak, at which point it will see even more rapid growth than it’s seen thus far—which is anything but slow, almost tripling in use in the first three months of 2012. By creating a Niche in the search engine market by appealing very much so to users searching for greater privacy, DuckDuckGo has been able to relatively quickly garner a solid consumer, or searcher, base (possibly through smaller cascades) and continues to grow. DuckDuckGo has established themselves as the search engine to seek for privacy and security, and thus have chosen a very fortuitous place to enter the market as it has provided them a searcher base large enough to build up the positive network effect that could one day cause the type of cascade that Google is afraid of.
-MG
http://searchengineland.com/could-duckduckgo-be-the-biggest-long-term-threat-to-google-118117
The competition has really grown strong and thus this search engine job has been tough job.
Used duckduckgo for sometime. Its really good. Nowdays there are lots of advertisements. Just fed up of them!!
I think Google dominates on desktop and laptops but the number of smartphones that have Bing as the default search engine is growing month on month. There are loads of stats around supporting the increase of users performing searches on mobile devices of desktops.
With Google heavily focused on driving people to use AdWords instead of natural listings, maybe Bing will dominate within 2 years?
I would be hard to compete with Google , none of search algos & indexing bot existing are comparable to Google standards, there should be something awesome coming in just like Facebook took over google’s orkut.
Google is king of all search engines until any other search engine made the services better. DuckDuckGo don index some posts.
I don’t think that it would be easy for any search engine to compete with Google in the long run. There is a threat to the search engine giant but not in the near future!
The competition has really grown strong Google dominates on desktop and laptops but the number of smartphones that have Bing as the default search engine is growing month on month. and thus this search engine job has been tough job.