The fight for search engine market share is not really a fair one – the largest player keeps itself out of the fray and has consistently expanded while the rest have seen their share of the pie diminish rapidly over time. Controlling almost 80% of the search engine market, Google is a mighty force in the search engine world. Consequently, this dominance has caused web developers to focus their search engine optimization techniques on Google in order to channel traffic and maximize return-on-investment.
Yahoo! is the closest rival to Google and has only 12% market share. Even if Microsoft were successful in acquiring Yahoo!, the combine search engine would have only a fifth of Google’s share. Unless there is a radical change in the web, it is difficult to foresee any shift in this equation in the near future. Other search engines, including Lycos, AltaVista, AOL, and Excite, account for only 4%. As Google’s popularity rises, these smaller search engines diminish in traffic, click-throughs and, subsequently, ROI for advertisers.
The online world has seen Google toying with economies of scale – unlimited demand, unlimited supply. Google has become such a ubiquitous part of the web, expanding far beyond its own domain with its numerous services and features. A steady increase in virtually all vertical markets has helped Google to establish a stronghold in web advertising as well. Launched in 2001, AdWords was so successful that Yahoo!, the then search ad leader, adopted key features from Google’s technology.
The one advantage that Google has created for itself is the fact that it remains a starting point on the Web. With most Internet users beginning from Google, the importance that it has in online marketing is paramount. While Google’s success is not linked to individual’s web sites, the relevance of the search engine is more pronounced if the results are accurate. Thus Google rewards traffic to more appropriate web sites, encouraging web entrepreneurship. After all, better results translate to an even larger market share for the search engine behemoth.