BPN 999 Google still rules the search market, but for how long?

The company Indenty has published a Dutch language report of 52 pages on search engine marketing under the title Google still determines, but for how long... The authors, Michel Bieze and Peter Schinkel, looked at the competition between search engines, the development in searching, search engine marketing campaigns and the search engine marketing bureaus.


In summary the following conclusions are produced:
- Competitors will be able to damage the imago of Google, now that Google has left the ‘do not evil’ principle behind and has replaced this with commercial monopoly. In the market opportunities are created for an Open Source Search engine, when this initiative is supported by the Open Source Community.
- Mobile internet will be mainly used for local search questions and the fulfilment of an immediate information need.
- Due to the Google algorithm updates, the link structure itself will be less influential. More stress will be on the relevance of web pages in the link structure and the uniqueness of the content in the web page.
- Social bookmarking and personalised search will be the trends for the next five years.
- SEA campaigns need well converting landing pages, the use of images and user interaction.
- For SEO campaigns the relevance of the web pages in link structures and the uniqueness of content will be more important. The top 500 advertisers will choose for a holistic approach with optimised web sites.
- For the search engine marketing bureaus client loyalty will be a challenge due to the rising level of knowledge among advertisers.

The report comes at an interesting time. The proposed merger of Microsoft and Yahoo will become a challenge to Google; of course the question still is whether Yahoo wants to merge with Microsoft (a pioneer of internet with the slowest internet software provider).

The report sees opportunities for an Open Source Search Engine. The founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, has started such an initiative under the name of Wiki Search. But the first trial was not impressive. Besides the search engine follows the same search principles as Google.

The report has a holy belief in Google’s algorithm, which is based on simplified Boolean operators and masses of results. I do not notice any research in other algorithms, which will deliver more precise results and less duplications. I take it also that internet users are becoming more and more versatile with searching and will be able to use the AND, OR and NOT as long as Boolean operators are in use.

Blog Posting Number: 999

search engine, search engine marketing
Tags: search engine, search engine marketingIdentity, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo