Comments on: The Changing Face of Search: Is Google Losing its Grip?

By: Kai Lo

Kai Lo — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 22:23:43 +0000

I definitely don’t think Google is losing its grip. You can do a survey to check how many people have Google.com as their homepage.

By: Marketing Man

Marketing Man — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 16:59:16 +0000

Yup, general consensus seems to be that twitter is going to be the new Google. I for one am dead keen to see where this all ends up, as the link model of search engine ranking is definitely becoming obsolete.

By: Jhangora

Jhangora — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 09:42:26 +0000

Change is a part of nature and competition is always good. Twitter may not replace google but it can certainly motivate google and other traditional search engines to better themselves. Semantic web does not seem possible. As something becomes popular people find out ways to fool that system.

Google makes sense of the net thru links and spammers have found out ways to fool the google spiders. Google is big so it can afford to penalize sites which do not conform to it’s rules.

There has to be a better way to sift thru the information on the web. Recently kosmix has got some funding for their search engine. let’s see if they can better google.

By: Online Marketing Blog

Online Marketing Blog — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 07:41:51 +0000

These new sites and services will never replace traditional search engine. Although i do believe they will take some of the market away from them.

By: Cheap Mobile Calls

Cheap Mobile Calls — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 10:22:51 +0000

“Might Twitter be the New Google?” One simple answer. No. Twitter is great for social media, but it is a very limited social media site that I could possibly see just being a quick fad.

Google is much more than search too. It has many amazing apps for a variety of things.

By: Ilia - SEO

Ilia - SEO — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 22:06:12 +0000

I found myself in this situation the other day:

I woke up in the morning and went outside for a cigarette like I usually do (I know, evil habit). The first thing I noticed was the smell of rubber burning. I then noticed a cloud of smoke coming from City Center area. “What is happening?” – I thought to myself as the sound of distant sirens became more clear.

I went on Google and froze for a minute. What do I search for? And even if I did know what to search for, Google won’t have the time to index that page anyway. I logged into Twitter and found a whole bunch of people from my area Twittering about the fire.

By: Best Man Speech

Best Man Speech — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 18:18:37 +0000

This is a great topic and one that I think a lot about. If you think back 10 years, right when google was starting to be known, the leader of business networking was Novell and Banyan Vines and the leaders in internet searches were excite, altavista, yahoo, etc. Most of these, except yahoo, are gone or severely diminished now.

Google spends a ton of cash on lots of things but still makes 80% of their money from their simple search page. If this goes under, so goes google.

But I do love their products. Can you say Google Earth?

By: Dieta

Dieta — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 12:44:33 +0000

People are using google for finding simple answers and tutorials or companies. Right now nobody looks for a funny/engaging site through google. What’d you even type? “funny intelligent blog”? That makes no sense. Enter social media and suddenly there are people who’ll recommend you the site best fitting your idea.

By: Patrick Slavenburg

Patrick Slavenburg — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 21:29:10 +0000

I think most opinions here are too one-sided. It’s too early to tell how Twitter will develop. Yes we all see potential, but a lot can happen.

In my opinion it’s clear nothing stays dominant forever. But just like everyone now says the USA will fall and China is the next USA, this is all WAYYYY too simple minded for my taste. A fragmented world yes, with a number of leading players.

So obviously Google will stay dominant for whole groups of people. Do you really think 50 % of the population who doesn’t even LIKE the internet, who emails, and maybe chats, and…. uses Google, is suddenly going to go social and Twitter ?

In that case.. how come *forums*, yes these mid 1990’s unusable lists of Q&A’s are still SO popular ? Why hasn’t everyone moved to projects and groups and all that on Myspace in 2002 ?

With all the tech babble, most experts forget one thing: just because something has the potential.. doesn’t mean it will happen. And just because something CAN happen, or even is in our best interest, doesn’t mean people actually change their behavior and start doing it.

I think you only have to look at any “real world” situation right now to understand that part…

By: Peter Hamilton

Peter Hamilton — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 18:37:39 +0000

What we learn in “Search 101” is that there are three different types of search.
1. Find – short sessions, targeted, high frequency of usage, local…
2. Discover – Clear need but not specific, long sessions, research.
3. Explore – Browsing with no specific target, entertainment search

Of course other social mechanisms will provide new ways of fulfilling these different search intentions especially in the “explore” category. However, I agree with many of these comments that it will be extremely difficult for things like twitter or stumbleupon to replace the “find” search intention. They just are not made for it, nor do they have the infrastructure necessary.
Obviously, the title was meant to cause some discussion which I think is worthy, but we need to make sure we are not comparing apples to oranges 🙂