Search Marketing News

The relevant elephant

It’s a jungle out there, but when it comes to the Internet - in the world of Search Engines anyway - there’s only one real beast that matters. Would it be stretching the cliché too far to identify the beast as being huge, grey and possessing big ears? Let’s hope not as it will give us a nice title. It’s an elephant and surprise, surprise its name is Google.

Of the 137 billion estimated total searches performed in the U.S. in 2008, 85 billion were done on Google. That’s more than 63% market share and leaves MSN, AOL, Yahoo, Ask and the rest fighting for the crumbs.

Even more impressive is that Google also captured almost 90 percent of the growth in search volume through 2008. The majority of that growth was accounted for by increased number of searches per person, as opposed to an increase in the number of people searching.

What’s the secret of Google’s supremacy?

Google achieved critical acclaim when it first appeared on the search scene for its clean layout and achieved a critical user mass, but those aren’t the reasons for its current success. Mass adoption that continued the momentum through word of mouth recommendation and referral? No, that’s not the reason either.

That people like to like Google and their purchases of Youtube, Blogspot/Blogger and Feedburner? No, that neither.

The real reason? Relevance.

Search engines apply highly complex, top secret algorithmic formulas by which they assess queries and match them to (hopefully) the most relevant returns. These formulas are the search companies’ capital, their core business differential and the means by which they claim their competitive advantage over each other, dictating their success as organisations through the ability of the codes to deliver what users want – relevance.

Google delivers relevance better than the others – it really is as simple as that.