People use Google for its quality and for its speed. Within both the organic and paid search world, Google has consistently been able to be more free of spam and lower quality (a subjective term) websites than the competition. If the worldwide economy gets worse, it won’t be surprising to see Google becoming more and more lax with their rules and policies, all of which could end up being the catalyst Microsoft needs to take market share away from Google.
2008 has been the year that Google began tightening its financial belt. Most recently, they’ve snubbed their golden geese (see: non-corporate advertisers) by being cheap and canceling their annual holiday gifts as if they’re in such dire financial trouble that they need to do it. By the way, Google is expecting to make around $6 billion in profit for 2008.
Specifically with their product, Google has been changing their bidding policies more and more lately. On an unscientific note, they also seem to be allowing arbitragers to make a comeback and very low quality sites to market their wares.
They’ve been updating their organic side of the business too. They’ve added SearchWiki and while I can’t seem to find the sources, I believe I’ve read about and have also seen first hand, Google search results getting worse in general. As an example, when trying to find the specific estimates for Google’s 2008 profits, I ended up getting results for news articles, but none of them had the correct info. At times, I’d also get results that had info on earnings, but they were for other companies, not Google’s. When I searched on Yahoo, first result was to Google’s investor relations page - probably should’ve just went directly there in the first place.
Meanwhile, a bit north of the Googleplex, Microsoft has been working hard on seriously getting into the search game. They’ve been using Live Cash Back, have been poaching Yahoo’s Yahoos, has special promotions for SEMPO members, signed a toolbar deal with Dell and has most recently has become much more willing to work with Yahoo again (who didn’t see that one coming?). While not all of these ideas will have a positive return for Microsoft, the combined payoff will keep Google on their toes and hopefully will give us advertisers more options for placing our ad dollars.
Google still has a huge lead over, well everybody. They are to search what Microsoft was/is to operating systems. At the same time, Microsoft has a warchest that they’re not afraid of spending. They’re working hard on improving their search technology and creating partnerships to increase their market share. If Google isn’t careful, they’ll create an opening for Microsoft to exploit which will lead to even fiercer competition since they both have similar traits: lots of cash, monopolistic, extremely competitive.
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