Google Dominance: Do other search engines matter?
With the absolute dominance of Google as the search engine of choice around the world, you have to ask a simple question, do other search engines matter?
Before the MegaGooglePlex
There was a time, believe it or not, just a few years ago now, when the mantle of “Top Search Engine” was held by Yahoo. Back then, users used a combination of Altavista, DogPile and to a lesser degree Microsoft’s search engine including manually monitored DMOZ. If you wanted to be successful online, you had to make sure Yahoo indexed you and the other search engines as well.
Who or what is Google anyways?
Based out of Mountain View, California, Google was co-founded on September 7th, 1998 (date of incorporation) by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they where both studying at Stanford University. As of this writing, they are just about to surpass the 20 thousand employee mark and it grew out from a Ph.D. Project along with a million dollar investment. Considering Google is worth googles of money now, if I would have put $1K into this company, my investment would be worth an astoundingly crazy amount of money today. Google has a very long history of growth through acquisition in both great companies and stellar employees. They don’t want the cream of the crop working for them, they want the absolute top percentile of the cream of the crop. It can easily be said that Google’s ability to attract the best minds across various fields is as large a factor as pure luck for why they are so successful today.
Today’s search landscape
As mentioned previously, Google now pretty owns the search engine market and they haven’t stopped there, they also offer free analytical, sitemap and a number of other programs to help you optimize your site. They even have a small system called Adsense and Adword that help people promote themselves even more… all this together improves not only their search results but builds up loyalty, something Yahoo has yet been able to do. There are a tonne of other search engines out there and on a few of my sites, I can tell you that Yahoo provides more visitors then Google but other then these two engines, everybody else is a far third place. Other search engines do provide some traffic and when you are in the internet monetizing business, any traffic is good traffic but I don’t focus on those smaller guys. Put another way, if you are fishing, do you optimize your fishing lure to catch a tadpole or the biggest bass in the lake? Search engine optimization is no different.
The Bottom Line
Search engines are a dime a dozen so don’t waste your time, optimize your site for the top players.
Buzvia: Google on Wikipedia
