3.2.10 Search engines competition

Google has been created in 1998 and was not a pioneer in the field of search engines. In a short period of time Google succeed to take the lead and among the pioneers in this field only Yahoo (created in 1994) is still in place.

Even if Google has a dominating position on the market it will take him a lot of time to be the number one in all countries (as we saw this market is not rational mainly due to political and cultural reasons). This situation is in fact giving hope/time to its competitors.

Yahoo is still in discussion with Microsoft in order to buy Yahoo search technologies. One can understand how strategic can be such acquisition. Yahoo having the research knowledge and Microsoft the funds as well as the software ownership.

Regarding Baidu we cannot clearly see how they could compete against Google outside of China.

What about new comers? Starting from nothing they could maybe beat famous search engines in a small period of time. It could have been the success of some services such as Cuil launched in summer 2008 which received a lot of advertisement through the news. (cf. Arrington, M. (2008). Cuil On BusinessWeek's Most Successful of 2008 List. Huh?.) But the search engines market is a very ungrateful world where visitors are giving no more than one chance: the product works or it does not. In the case of Cuil it did not.

"An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him not to have it." (Mooers, N. C. (1959). A panel discussion at the Annual Meeting of the

American Documentation Institute. 24 October.)

Users want the information as soon as they can. When you move from Google to another search engine you are often intransigent. At the first result which does not fit your expectations you will go back to Google. But is the search engine wrong or is it because it is responding differently that on what you were used to?

As a conclusion it is hard to say how Google can lose his dominant position. Until now only one company succeeds to make a such gap in the world of

search engine and it is Google itself and it was in a period where everything had to be created on the Internet.

A new technology regarding research is however more and more recurrent in this field and is called semantic research.