Remember Altavista? How about Lycos, or Excite? It wasn’t that long ago (well maybe long in terms of internet time, but not real world time!) that these search engines were highly popular, competing with each other to become the favourite of the people. Fast forward a decade or so and they had all but disappeared into the history books, replaced primarily, but the super power that is Google. While Yahoo and Bing do get some traffic, Google has by far the largest number of searches conducted, truly dominating the competition. Some people choose to use other search engines, some people use them without meaning to when they don’t realise the default search engine in their browser or on a website they’re visiting is something other than Google.
Quite often the first reaction after the search results appear is something along the lines of ‘ah you got me! This isn’t Google” and the next step is to go to the address bar, and type in www.google.com. No chance for mistakes second time round. It would be interesting to have a peek through the analytics of search engines and see just how much traffic goes to Google from search results pages of the competition. And with Google having such better accuracy than the others it’s no wonder why.
The question remains though, will anyone ever knock Google off their perch? MySpace was once the world’s top social media platform, Encyclopaedia Britannica was once the ultimate resource for finding information and answers. Times change, and who knows what will happen over the next decade. All we can do is wait and see what the future has in store for us!
