The number of search engines on the internet seems to grow daily. But can any of them beat the search giant Google?
Canadian internet marketer Titas Hoskins, fairly well known in certain circles, answers this question in his article “New Search Engines – Can Anyone Beat Google?”.
Google is the leading search engine today. US residents pick Google for online search in 72% of cases; for the rest of the world the figure is even higher. For Ukraine, the share of Google users is 74%, with Yandex in second place.
But internet marketers carefully watch the rise of new search engines — especially those capturing significant quality traffic. However, Hoskins notes you must remember the traffic share of such systems is small — directly or indirectly, Google is responsible for roughly 80% of their online revenue. Even if someone claims Google is the best, that’s no reason to just echo them.
The online marketer must objectively and realistically study all possible opinions about new search engines. Any competent internet marketer and webmaster knows: if you’re #1 in the three largest engines — Google, Yahoo!, and MSN — for a specific keyword, the main traffic still comes from Google.
Although Google obviously dominates, in essence it only entered this market relatively recently. Don’t forget: many search engines existed before it, and more will operate after. Each company has its time. Then knowledge and experience pass to successors. But are Google’s days numbered? In the near future — certainly not. But young search engines have already entered the market that could eventually eclipse Google.
John D. Sutter’s CNN article “New search engines aim to supplement Google” analyses new engines including Twine, Hakia, Searchme, Cuil, Kosmix, Wolfram Alpha, Topsy, TweetMeme, and OneRiot. They all differ: some focus on more personalised search, others on visual search, others search social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
Microsoft’s new Bing search engine — a long-time competitor — may also become a serious rival to Google. It looks like Google in many ways but is still different. It presents results visually quite pleasantly — with nice preview buttons, similar queries, and search history. But only time will tell whether users will “Bing” instead of “Google”. As Hoskins says: “To Bing or not to Bing — that is the question.”
Among possible Google rivals we can mention Searchme. It offers visual search with the ability to scroll through page screenshots that replace the link list (similar to the iTunes interface). Searchme is positioned as the first multimedia search engine.
But despite many actively developing competitors, Google currently holds the leading position. It rapidly adapts to change, updates itself. And naturally, it won’t give up its position easily. As Titas Hoskins notes, whatever rivals Google gets, their fight will resemble the battle of David and Goliath.
