It’s hard to imagine the death of search as we know it, but search is changing as we speak, and unless Google finds some flexibility, the company will be at the forefront of innovation no longer. The dent in Google’s armor comes from rather surprising directions, not from Microsoft or Yahoo—both with their own rigid corporate paralysis—but from Twitter and Facebook, where users create their very own walled gardens.
From the outset it’s important to say that Google isn’t going anywhere. Who else can scan a trillion URLs with the kind of efficiency Google can? Nobody has technology that can equal, and as things evolve challenging that technological supremacy is proving to be Microsoft’s biggest misguidance. Competitors should have been evolving new spaces instead of crawling into what became exclusively Google’s.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt has admitted both that Google is not immune to the economy and that he’s currently more interested in letting the cash pile up than he is in acquiring the latest darling startup that is Twitter.
Indeed the cash cow is a bit dry at the moment. SEMPO has adjusted down its search marketing spending forecasts for the next three years.
Marissa Mayer
Google he writes. “Facebook (and for some, like this site, Twitter) is becoming a primary source of traffic.”
That means that Google is no longer the be all and end all of traffic flow. And that’s bad for Google’s business. (It also, as a side note, proves the absurdity of the idea that this market can really be cornered once and for all.)
The biggest current obstacle is business model. Neither Twitter nor Facebook have one at the moment. Once that’s settled, another obstacle: how to control for the eventual (and currently swelling) spam deluge.
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