Remember a more genteel time on the web, when you searched with Webcrawler & Altavista, and Netscape was the browser of choice for those who wanted a free alternative to IE (or you paid for Opera)? Alas, those balmy "summer" days of the Internet are well past. This is definitely the "winter" of Google.
I found some disturbing stats on search engine share. The figures are compiled, and update twice a month, by Compete, Nielsen-Net, Alexa, seoMoz, StatsCounter - GlobalStats, and Karma Snack's Snackfolio traffic analytics. We all knew Google was taking over, but did you realize by how much? Click the image to see and, in that famous line from "The Fly", be afraid, be very afraid....
Anti-competitive Google?
Is Google being anti-competitive? Who cares if they are? YOU SHOULD! For the same reason so many people complain about Microsoft, the same charge should be levelled at Google. Their constant expansion is great for THEIR business, but what about yours?
Being #1 on Google isn't where Internet marketing stops!
With such a massive market share, it's a simple job for Google to do whatever they like. Just try to get sense from Adwords - they don't care about losing a few customers, there's very few good alternatives.
Google has just announced plans to commence charging for Google Product Search (now Google Shopping) in October, following their announcement in May. In this announcement you can read the "great" arguments and platitudes Google backs this with - whatever! The bottom line is Google wants to increase its US$2.8 billion, well, bottom line!
Charging doesn't hurt the consumer
Are you serious? That's as stupid as saying that Walmart coming to a small town is a good thing. In a small town, when a giant like Walmart arrives, local, Mom and Pop business are forced to close, unemployment rises, and wages go down.
With the advent of Google charging, I predict that smaller businesses who can, for a few more hours, take advantage of free product promotion, will disappear from the top pages as they cannot compete with the big boys. Does this make Google's results more relevant to you, or more relevant to Google's bottom line?
