For every commodity that man has made there is at least more than one company making that product. A particular company might be in lead overshadowing existence of others in a field, but there never is a case of being sole makers of everyday necessities whether they be of technological nature or not. However, there is always a case of being the first to do so. Like Benz making cars, like Edison generating electricity, like Hershey producing chocolates and so on. Today these are trusted and quality driven brand names.
One of the first search engines was W3 Catalog which was launched in 1993 and is now closed. Google seems to be the only search engine, but there are many more like Yahoo!, Baidu, Bing, etc. But the heights that Google search engine has reached had become the standard. Google holds 82.80% of the market shares as of May 2011. Although other search engines are popular in certain parts of the world, but Google holds international position. Google being the standard bearer in search engines, terms like “googling” or “googled” for searching and searched have become verbs of common parlance.
Due to this huge popularity of Google, smaller search engine companies seem to finish out every week one by one, most of which do not even get a recognition of name let alone usage. Under such circumstances, money and human energies spent in launching a project goes to nothing at the end. The competition is tough certainly, but survival of the fittest cannot always be the rule in this social media Darwinism. Sometimes, all that is required is a good timing. Marketing strategy in social media is more about time of launch rather than or more so than about how good your product is.
The case of MySpace, which was the first popular social networking website, or that of Orkut for that matter comes to mind. Both of these are not out of business, but comparatively a late comer like Facebook has gain more popularity than these two, in fact, more than any other social network. Were people tired from using MySpace and Orkut and felt a breath of fresh air when Facebook came along? Though more so than this, it was about being simple rather than trying too hard. Google has been there at the top because it has gained trust from users and researchers. Albeit not without controversy to it as well when Google Bombing brought forth its bias for reasons of commercial success and social-political prejudice.
But people know that Google rankings are what matters when it comes to social media research so they satisfactorily rely on it. Again the secret of Google’s success is in simplicity in giving results without diverting to other places on the internet. The information provided by Google is so trustworthy that even governments are asking Google to share information and personal data on people. Though Google has declined some of these queries by the government, but has also entered controversial waters, so to speak, when it did comply with the governments’ requests. So one thing that users might not like about Google is the amount of information Google has on them.
When out there in the market, the thing that matters is trust in your name and performance, rather than in your image. Google is not what it is because it is scarier and we have to obey its rule while searching online, but rather its friendly interface is what has led users to stick to it and get their search done in no time.
Google tools for social media and business solution like Google AdSense, Google Alerts, Google Analytics, Google Insights, Google Keyword, Google Trends and Google Web Optimizer have made social media research and development very easy for online businesses, which are the services not quite satisfactorily provided by others. Google has an advantage of holding extensive data. Despite the success it already has, to maintain it Google has also learnt to adapt and to improve for better with introduction of newer tools. This is why there is a higher chance than of anything else, unless an unpredictable change happens, for the foreseeable future we might always be googling while on the web.
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