• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Google's Reigns Over Internet Search Industry

Posted on: Saturday, 3 September 2005, 06:00 CDT

From Staff Reports
Cavalier Daily ( U. Virginia )

(U-WIRE) CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. -- With Microsoft's supremacy in the last few decades, Google has taken on the economics of search to end this monopoly. Microsoft entered the search-engine industry to reclaim its lost pride by launching its stand-alone msn.com -- a search engine that poses a threat to Google. Whatever the outcome of this so-called battle is, the consumers are going to be the winners. It didn't take long for Bill Gates to realize the real potential in this sector of the Internet. "We took an approach that I now realize was wrong," Gates said of his company's earlier decision to ignore the search market. Though Google is by far the most used search engine on the Internet all over the world, Gates pointedly added, "We will catch them." Last year, on Apr. 1, Google launched its own new e-mail portal called Gmail that promised 1,000MB of free e-mail storage space - something unthinkable at the time. What was first believed to be an April Fool's joke turned out to be a hard reality for almost every other Web mail service provider across the World Wide Web. In response, Microsoft couldn't do much by increasing the size of its accounts from 2MB to 25MB. By recognizing what consumers demand, Google makes their users' dreams a reality. Traditionally the business model of almost all e-mail portals was to enforce free users by limiting size and promoting their superior services for a fee. Gmail's new innovative model considered its competitors' moves and maneuvered its own by coming up with something unimaginable -- scanning e-mail messages to have more targeted ads that show up as links on the side of the screen, while maintaining privacy. With the Google search engine incorporated in Gmail, e-mail search made life easier when coupled with threaded discussions. This not only has changed the way most of its users looked at Google Inc., but Google paved the way for other competitors (namely Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and others). Gmail on its first birthday yet again proved to its competitors that innovation and change are the keys to success. Can you imagine a day when you don't have to delete your e-mails? Think no more! Long gone are those days -- Gmail is possibly aiming on infinite storage for its users for email when it expanded from 1 GB of storage to 2 GB and rising every second. Google's introduction of desktop searches crushed rivals Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL in the competition to incorporate Web navigation with PC search and stay on the top of search technology beyond everyone's intelligence. Desktop search has created a priority by all the major search engine companies across the e-world toward improvement. However, Microsoft poses a major threat to Google's regime because of its dominance with the Windows operating system and the ability to control most PCs. Google "not only beat their rivals to the punch, they have also changed the rules," of the game, said Danny Sullivan, a search industry specialist and editor of SearchEngineWatch.com. "They're saying, 'We're not making search part of the operating system (OS), we're making the desktop part of Google.'" With Microsoft Windows already working toward its new version (codenamed Longhorn), Google cashed its opportunity by actually coming up with a desktop search tool in real time. While Microsoft still claims its new improved search engine in its new OS will integrate searches on local desktops as well as on the Web, Google has made it possible -- something that is going to shape search-engine technology for the future. Although Google already has converted it into a reality, the future seems to be bright with higher spending in research for an operating system and thereby competing with Microsoft, becoming a potential threat. Google's coming up with an operating system in competition with Microsoft's Windows is something that is quite impractical because of Microsoft's establishment and the reliance by almost 90 percent of the world's users on it. Google's influence in our daily lives will become evident when it launches its rumored browser and perhaps builds an operating system as well. Google's expansion in numerous services ranges from search engine, to news archives, library searches, desktop applications, online shopping, instant messaging, and maps and local yellow pages to many more. If Google stays on target with these plans as it has done previously, it's not hard to predict that one day Googleplex will be controlling almost everything in the world across the World Wide Web.

(C) 2005 Cavalier Daily via U-WIRE

Source: U-WIRE

More News in this Category