At a time when the search engine market was controlled by billion dollar heavy weights like AltaVista, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves came along the little search engine who could. Within a short time this little search engine known as Google brought down the heavy weights.
Google took down these heavy weights because it was a great search engine, by providing the most obvious of things
§ People want simplicity so Google sold itself on a simple homepage with only a search box
§ People want to find information quicker and sooner so Google sold itself on relevancy.
As the years have gone by Google has become more clutered and its search engine has become less reliable with typical search results being full of spam or being inaccurate.
Many times now I find myself having to go past page two in order to find the information I need. I still use the search engine the same way I did all those years back, even tried using Boolean to help improve the accuracy of the results.
Since those early years Google has grown into a giant of a company . Since the days of Googles dream of Stock market flotation , the company has become a $130 billion dollar company and has added many new products – Image Search, News Search, Toolbar, Froogle, GMail, Maps.
Googles simplicity drove people to start using it rather than the advertising cluttered competitors. These days everything Google does is aimed at making it and its shareholders as much money as possible.
The only way for google to make more money than its competitors is to target advertisements to specific users needs. In order for google to targets ads it needs to know as much information about its users as it can. When you use any of googles products, google looks at your search behaviour by reading a cookie it keeps on your computer. Google also reads your data from Emails to data entries and customizes advertisements that match your data. This gathering of your private information by Google or any other company has led to calls about how honest Google as a company is and how far it would go to make money.
These days google faces the same problems every stock market company faces. The truth is as a stock market company just maintaining your position is not good enough. Each year there is an expectation of growth and it is expected of you as a company to make more money each year.
Slowly Google is losing its focus and why customers first chose them over the likes of Altavista,Yahoo and Excite.
When it comes to relevancy of your results google no longer delivers. Googles major winning point when it came out initially was that as a young company you can innovate and try new things. If those new things fail then you move on and try something else. Whilst a Stock market listed company doesn’t have the same freedom. When a stock Market listed company tries to innovate and the new things fail then the stock market listed company loses billions in its share price. Search like all things in Technology has to move forwards , developing new concepts and trying new ways to improve search retrieval. Google like most people needs to realise that technology and its search algorithms needs to move forwards. As “Experts” start to offer search engine optimization services and try to get ahead of the pile , pagerank has become worthless.
