Metafluence

Google isn’t going anywhere anytime soon

Earlier this week Robert Scoble said Google will be beaten by Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook in four years. While I don’t think Google will be beaten by anybody in four years, I do think his underlying thought has merit. When people want to know more about a subject, simply returning an algorithmically order list of web pages isn’t enough to win long-term.

And as true as that statement is, thinking about Google as a search company is pretty short-sighted. Google has long since diversified into many areas including a suite of online applications, miles of dark fiber, and the upcoming release of the Google phone. I also think Google’s brand in search is too strong for a small time player to come in and muscle them out. At best someone would be a threat before being acquired by Google or simply outdone by them.

If Google was going to lose to a socially contributed search competitor, it would have been Wikipedia. The game isn’t over, so I’m not saying that Wikipedia doesn’t still have a chance to unseat the search giant, but they haven’t done so in the six years since they started and I don’t think it will happen in the next four.

Mahalo is the best example of a human edited search engine, but they are still working toward the top 10,000 searches. It’s going to take them decades just to reach the number of searches Google handles in one day!

Facebook users are not know for their content contributions for the greater good. It’s an entirely narcissistic community driven by the desire to see who left them a message. Don’t get me wrong, I have a Facebook account.

Digg users, on the other hand, are known for their massive user contributions, but the problem there is that it becomes cliquey. All of the information that comes out of Digg is inline with the Digg “in-crowd”, which is hardly a group that appeals to the mainstream (I can almost see Benjamin Diggles nodding his head now).

The truth is, some of the big player have been trying to spice up the traditional search engine results pages. Ask.com has been innovating quite a bit in order to get their property back in the big game. They offer a host of cool features, much like Mahalo, but leverage an algorithm to do so. Their features include:

1. Expanded content from the top hit
2. Narrow your search
3. Expand your search
4. Image results displayed on the same page
5. If it’s music, they’ll pull in popular tracks related to your search
6. Related Wikipedia content

Ask has been providing an improved results page for a couple of years now with innovations that continue to appear, yet they also haven’t unseated Google as the dominant search provider.

This is not to say that there isn’t room for innovation or that we won’t see an improved search results page, however, given that quality solutions have been competing for some time now and they haven’t toppled the almighty G does point to the fact that it is going to be a slow process.