Who’s Killing Who in Online Search?

Ever since Google established itself as the Big Dog in online search with 35% of the market share in 2001, whenever there has been a new search engine or search technology brewing there has been an expectation (by someone somewhere) that it will be a “Google Killer”. 

Here are a few of the more buzzworthy Google-killers from the last few years:

• March 2006:  Microsoft Live Search
• January 2007:  Wikia Search (Wikipedia’s Google-Killer)
• October 2007:  Yahoo Search Assist (Yahoo’s Flickr Integration )
• July 2008:  Cuil
• March 2009:  Twitter search
• May 2009:  Wolfram Alpha
• June 2009:  Bing
   

In 2010, expect to see even more “killers” in the online world.  Its no longer about who is going to try to overtake Google in search market share…there have been tons of attempts, but nothing has taken hold up to this point. 

Now we are seeing more “killers” in the social media space.  But history has taught us not to attack Google where they dominate – search.  Social Channels play nice with Google when it comes to search.  While many social platforms have developed their own search engine – they still rely on the big  3; make that 2 engines to power the results.  However, there is opportunity to attack Google in other places that can be damaging, like email / Gmail.  Have you heard about Facebook’s webmail that is in development? 

But Google is always ready to pull something from their arsenal – and it is not Microsoft, Facebook, or even Twitter that seems to be on the radar – despite the rollout of Google Buzz, called a Twitter-killer by some.  Rather, we are seeing Google penetrate and gain momentum in other areas like mobile with the Nexus phone (iPhone killer) and Chrome OS Tablet (iPad killer).  This crossover into retail mobile should help Google continue to dominate in the online world. 

Even more interesting to watch will be Google’s foray into broadband with their 1-gigabit-per-second broadband networks.