Why Google must die?! Why Google won’t die!
Reading a rant about Why Google Must Die I figured it would be good to share a couple of thoughts why Google didn’t die and won’t die in the foreseeable future regardless of what the particular author may think. Yes, there are a couple of good points in John C. Dvorak’s post (parking sites that rank high sucks and too much paid ads, but that’s subjective) but overall conclusion sounds like a rant of a cranky industry veteran.
No matter how much a company like Google tries to be user-centric, its master/business plan(s) will continue to be dominating the market (in which it succeeds) and reaping the benefits of all the long tails it can find (which it does with a solid RBI, i.e. success rate). In my view, that’s all good. Here’s why.
Google Search has positioned Google where it is today - the switchboard of the Internet (funnily enough, I’ve used this term for years and just discovered it is mentioned only two times!). Google knows what people are looking for and what YOU are looking for, too (if you have a Google account that is). What it became apparent after a couple of years of Google Search spartan interface isthat search is THE killer application of the Internet with all truckloads amounts of information online behind every cornernode of the net.
At the end of the day, It’s still better than other search engines because you do get the results you can use. There’s this perennial hot topic that page ranking is, which is another subjective issue and Google has vested interest itself to be subjective itself. ;-) But what happened as an increasing number of us continued using Google Search as our start page? We gave enough information back to Google that they figured out how to use it and turn into a sustainable business. Over time they kept tweakingchanging their ranking algorithm(s) and gave birth to a whole cohort of mysterious people called SEO people while at the same time the Google created the official path to higher ranking called AdWords, while kept leapfrogging the SEO people. From one point, this caused SEO vs. paid-search has become a chicken-and-egg problem that only a small amount of people can crack while Google algorithms remained a moving target and AdWords auction has become a stock market of internet keyword trends.
People who complain of not being able to find something on the first page are usually the same people who tend to think Internet and Google are the same thing meaning, in a way, they too love Google. :-)
Instead of bitching about something too subjective, since there are no other competitors that can seriously threaten Google on the Internet, pehaps we should be worried about something more realistic.
