Does everyone love Google?

The popularity of Internet search from Google in the USA is growing. Over the past three years, the speed with which Google occupies the search market is increasing. Many people think that, ultimately, Google will become the only search engine and nothing will remain of its competitors.

Undoubtedly, antitrust laws are a growing danger to the company. Last year The company has not entered into such a welcome agreement with Yahoo on reciprocal advertising. Justice Department assured Google that it would block the deal. Last week, the small company TradeComet.com sued Google; she believes that Google is manipulating its advertising system so as to harm potential competitors.

When I asked for a meeting with Google’s chief economist (I wanted to discuss why the market take-up rate is increasing), I was also offered to meet with Dana Wagner, a key figure in antitrust law.
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Google believes that its leadership in search is insignificant, and that it can evaporate with a single mouse click.
But take a look at comScore's research: in July 2005, Google surpassed Yahoo by 6 percent 36.5 versus 30.5, today the gap is more than 40 percent, 63 versus 21.

“Google can be regretted,” says Danny Sullivan, chief editor of Search Engine Land. “They really work well and people choose their product. But when they occupied more than 70 percent of the market, people began to think that Google was evil and become a monopoly. ”

Google does not count monthly fluctuations in the number of requests; January comScore’s calculations show Google’s share of 0.5 percent, compared with December earned by Yahoo, Hitwise’s calculations suggest that Google’s share of the US market is 72 percent compared to 17.9 for Yahoo and 5.4 for search engines Microsoft, MSN and Live.com.

Mr. Sullivan believes that while Yahoo is actively promoting its search in its services, such as Yahoo Mail, the possibility of attracting third-party users is very small.

Many site owners who track where their users came from report about 80-90 percent of conversions from google.com. For example, almost all visitors of Stack Overflow (a community of programmers asking and answering questions) coming from search engines come from google.com. In January, Stack Overflow was visited by more than 3 million people, they came from 22 search sites, of which 99.34 percent of google.com.

Jeff Atwood, one of the founders of Stack Overflow, “I have no problems with Google, I like Google, but I’m concerned, if nothing changes, it’s easy to predict what will happen in 4 years, just look at the graph, a world without competition does not look healthy” .

At Google, Chief Economist Hal Varian and Mr. Wagner says that people do not have a blind commitment to a single search engine, they cite a recent Forrester Research study in which 55 percent of adults surveyed use more than 1 search engine per week.

“You buy a car, drive it for 4 years, then start to choose a new one, but everything is different for search, we fight for every click, if more and more people use Google, then this is because they think it is better” Mr. Wagner.

Mr. Sullivan studies the search engines since 1995, he says that similar studies were conducted quite often, they all could not prove that the user has an attachment to one of the search engines. When a user uses an alternative, he is not trying to evaluate or test a search engine, then he just uses his favorite site, which he is used to, Google is a habit, and habits are very difficult to change.

Yahoo and Microsoft, based on internal research, claim that their search engines have achieved the same quality as Google, but this is not the main thing.

“Regardless of where we are, a little ahead or behind Google’s relevance, this is not a decisive argument,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, chief search strategy at Yahoo.

Yahoo’s chance is to offer a radically new way of providing information to users so that the user can complete a job that has begun, such as finding a job or buying a plane ticket. “People don't like to search, it's just a waste of time,” Mr. Raghavan, - “They want to finish the job.”

What Yahoo and Microsoft cannot achieve is brand awareness, in fact, the word Google became a verb in 2002. Mr. Raghavan defines Google as a synonym for search.

I asked Mr. Sullivan, should we use multiple search engines to "maintain" the competition. He replied that such an approach was difficult to implement. "Most likely, I will continue to use what I like and this is Google, if you think that someone should use the search from Microsoft, this is the same as saying, you should find a new best friend."

www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/business/22digi.html?ref=technology