Commercial realities of Google
It’s often surprising to see just how many tools and services Google offers and how many products Google is working on. But few of these are particularly successful and only this week Google Answers closed having attracted, ‘more than 800 [users] users of the years’.
That’s an abysmal performance: rival Yahoo! Answers contains 65 million answers to seven million questions.
There is no doubt that Google search has been a runaway success and that success is down to the vision of Google’s founders but, in truth, Google’s success is overstated. Prior to Google, AltaVista was the dominant search engine, but it was neglected by its owner who saw it as no more than an opportunity to show off its servers. The internet grew too fast for AltaVista’s sponsors and the search engine effectively fell down. It could take months for webpages to be indexed and longer for AltaVista to notice they’d gone.
Into the void stepped Google. And more important than the search technology was the simple business model that turned search into a money making monster that answers 91 million queries a day. But go through the long list of Google products and winners are thin on the ground.
Contact Stephen Newton
Comments (No comments)
There are no comments on this post so far.
Post a comment