How to unseat Google

21.05.2009 Posted in Search

The recent launch of Wolfram Alpha (see my colleague’s excellent blog entry below) was followed by the usual flurry of press speculation along the lines of ‘Will this be the new Google?’. Which in turn was followed by the usual conclusion that it wouldn’t.

It is perhaps not surprising that there is always intense media interest surrounding the launch of new search engines, but it is often rather misdirected. I was very impressed with Wolfram Alpha. If you want to know the historical population of the UK, or look up a share price, it’s brilliant. It is not a tool for finding cheap deals on car insurance, or finding a nice place to go on holiday. No matter. As far as I’m aware, those behind the site have never made grand claims or done anything to whip up the sort of press frenzy that eventually turned sour against Cuil.

But what about the question that really gets people excited - will Google ever be unseated as Planet Earth’s search engine of choice, and by whom?

Any innovative new entrant should be welcomed with open arms. The global market for search has been dominated for many years by a very small number of players, and they need some serious challengers. But will the towers of Google every be toppled?

It’s going to be mighty tough. Google has one very significant and unassailable advantage over any new entrant. It has a vast base of users and is able to track and analyse the behaviour of these people to tune and refine its service.

This behavioural aspect just didn’t exist when Google was launched. Its early success was driven by two things: Quality of results and simplicity of presentation. The results were better because it used a new way to index and rank websites. It wasn’t rocket science, but it worked well (at least by the standards of the day, which seem pretty rudimentary nowerdays).

New entrants may come up with amazing new ways to index sites, but without a sizeable user base to provide behavioural information it seems unlikely that they will ever be able to challenge Google based principally on the the quality of the search results delivered.

Which brings us to presentation. Google’s theme is simplicity. Simple plain, white pages with text listings and text ads. No graphics, no videos, and no floral backgrounds. When Google launched, the competition was mainly from ‘portal’ pages (Yahoo, MSN etc) that also carried news, weather forecasts, webmail and a host of other features. Not surprisingly, people loved the purity of the approach.

As time goes on, Google faces an increasing dilemma. On the one hand, browser and screen technology marches on. In 1998 most of us had a monitor with 500,000-odd pixels and web pages were considered fairly advanced if they featured static images. Ten years later I am writing this blog on a monitor with 2.3 million pixels. Web pages that don’t include at least some Flash, Javascript or video are considered basic.

Google dare not risk alienating its precious user base with radical changes to its ‘look and feel’, but failing to capitalise on these new capabilities leaves may leave them vulnerable. So far they’ve played it pretty safe - apart from some minor tweaking, Google still looks remarkably similar to the way it did when it was being run out of a garage (you can view an archive of their home page in a new window here).

So, I can’t tell you which search engine will eventually unseat Google. It will provide good search results, but probably no better (and possibly even slightly worse) than you get from the Big G. It may not have as big an index. But I can tell you one thing about it. You will see it for the first time and think ‘wow, that’s impressive!’. It’s going to be very different from the first time you saw Google (if this is too far back to remember, you probably had the same thought as me, which was along the lines of ’err…is that it?’).

Remember the first time you saw the iphone in use? Yep, that’s what I mean. The iPhone is just a phone. Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson et al already had millions of phones in circulation when it came along, and had spent years refining their user interfaces. The iPhone doesn’t make better calls. It has a rubbish camera. Fundamentally, it doesn’t do anything that can’t be done by lots of other phones. But it looks fabulous.

The iPhone of search. That’s what I’m looking out for.