Google's dominance in Web search is growing and may grow even more thanks to a change in underlying technology it uses to present search results. So much for Steve Ballmer's ambitions for Microsoft.
Google had a 63.7 percent share of the 14.3 billion U.S. searches in March, up 0.4 percentage points from February, and above the 63.5 percent level that was its previous high. Meanwhile, Yahoo saw its U.S. search share inch downward in March to 20.5 percent, from 20.6 percent in February. I suppose we need to mention that Microsoft's share of the U.S. search market increased by one-tenth of a percentage point, to 8.3 percent in March.
Microsoft got 11 percent more search queries than in February, while Google got "only" 10 percent more -- but look at the base. Microsoft went from 1 billion to 1.2 billion queries, whereas Google went from 8.3 billion to 9.1 billion search queries.
The reality is that Google is whupping Microsoft up one side and down the other, and the beating only promises to get worse. Google is testing a new way to present search results that uses the JavaScript programming language and the related AJAX interface technology, not just regular HTML, to display the information. Google spokesman Eitan Bencuya explained to CNET's Steve Shankland that the change could shave milliseconds off response times, and Google has found that even minute improvements in that speed encourages people to search more often.
http://googlewatch.eweek.com/content/google_search/google_dominates_search_more_than_ever.html
In the past two years, Microsoft's Internet Explorer has bled 12 percentage points in market share, from 78.28 percent to 66.82 percent, according to data from Net Applications, while the open-source Mozilla Firefox browser has leaped nearly 7 percentage points, from 15.49 percent to 22.05 percent. Meanwhile, Apple's Safari has nearly doubled its market share, to 8.23 percent, and Google's Chrome has grown to 1.23 percent.
Microsoft can't be happy, the more browser market share Microsoft loses, the easier it becomes for it to also lose operating-system market share. Indeed, over the same two-year period, Microsoft Windows has lost five percentage points in market share while Apple's Mac OS X has gained more than three percentage points and Linux has more than doubled its share. The browser, quite simply, makes the operating system much less relevant to the computing experience. This is why Apple and Google continue to invest heavily in their respective browser initiatives: the browser is the key to operating-system disruption.
For this same reason, however, both would do better to invest in Firefox, the "Linux of browsers." In some ways, the browser efforts of Apple and Google are much like the Unix efforts of IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun Microsystems: they threaten to splinter the browser counterattack on Microsoft rather than solidify it. Common investment in Firefox, however, would leave the industry better off, just as common investment in Linux has. Firefox, for its part, is thriving on its own. IE lacks the community flair that makes Firefox so appealing. Just imagine what it could do with the resources of Apple and Google behind it. Microsoft probably has had, and still has, nightmares about that scenario.
Usability guru, Jakob Nielsen shares an interesting finding that goes against the wishes of content portals:
Instead of dawdling on websites many users want simply to reach a site quickly, complete a task and leave. Most ignore efforts to make them linger and are suspicious of promotions designed to hold their attention..many are "hot potato" driven and just want to get a specific task completed. [source]
He cites couple of reasons for this -
The designs have become better but also users have become accustomed to that interactive environment
Web users were also getting very frustrated with all the extras, such as widgets and applications, being added to sites to make them more friendly.
Interesting stats
In 2004, about 40% of people visited a homepage and then
drilled down to where they wanted to go and 60% use a deep link that took them directly to a page or destination inside a site. In 2008, said Dr Nielsen, only 25% of people travel via a homepage. The rest search and get straight there.
What does this mean?
Search engines rule the world. Content portals, no matter how hard they try will have a difficulty in retaining the users (and monetizing).
Success metrics need to be revisited - it should not be pageviews anymore (and am not talking about AJAX and PV issue). UUs and Returning frequency is what really matters. At the same time, content portals should rethink their push-approach (for e.g. rss feeds) and make that as part of the content strategy.
Jakob makes another interesting point - widgets are not adding value to sites, they actually are affecting the load time badly.
Chad Hurley, The Co-Founder of You Tube notes that 13 hours worth of videos are uploaded every minute to YouTube (a figure we’ve reported before). And he predicts more of the same: more videos will be uploaded to the Web, more video creators will be uploading those videos, and more viewers will be watching them on all sorts of screens from the living room to their mobile devices. In other words, more of the same means more exponential growth of videos on the Web.
Hurley’s vision of the future, though, pretty much describes the world as it is today. You can watch YouTube on your TiVo, iPhone, or PC. But if you read between the lines, he does hint that mobile might be the next really big step for YouTube.
Our goal is to allow every person on the planet to participate by making the upload process as simple as placing a phone call. This new video content will be available on any screen - in your your living room, or on your device in your pocket. YouTube and other sites will bring together all the diverse media which matters to you, from videos of family and friends to news, music, sports, cooking and much, much more.
The mobile opportunity for YouTube is bigger than just making all the video in the world available in your pocket. Mobile phones are also the new video cameras. Once it becomes truly easy to upload video from your phone to YouTube, it could truly become the repository of every captured moment in people’s lives.
For all his visions of the future, however, Hurley still has to figure out how make money from all of those videos.
courtesy:techcrunch
Google's dominance in Web search is growing and may grow even more thanks to a change in underlying technology it uses to present search results. So much for Steve Ballmer's ambitions for Microsoft.
