After watching the string of new releases by Google, Yahoo and MSN over the past months, I can’t help but feel that more money and time is being spent on flashy new eye-candy services like Google and MSN’s satellite services then on improving core search functionality. I do about 1-200 Google searches every day, but other then the one time I looked up the White house on Google’s satellite service out of curiosity I’ve never been back. Ditto with Yahoo’s myYahoo service, I tried it once out of curiosity and didn’t go back. All these efforts seem to be designed to create a more sticky portal for newbies, but the simple point of the matter is that at the base of it all, people will stick with the “portal” that also returns the best search results. Google search is popular not because it is has lots of eye-candy, but rather because it returns the best results in the fastest times and doesn’t clutter up their results with lots of spurious results and eye-candy. Google News is popular because it does exactly what you’d expect it to do and nothing more. It sweeps the Internet looking for the latest news and categorizes it nicely for us, again without loading up on unnecessary eye-candy . It is to be expected that this would happen when Microsoft jumped into search, they are after all the kings of eye-candy but I had hoped Google wouldn’t be tricked into moving away from the very reason why they are the search leaders in the first place. Were I in Google’s place, I’d be busy turning Google desktop search into a killer application and porting it to work on Linux and Macintosh desktops, they are competing against Microsoft now, and Microsoft plans to extensively embed their search technology into the next version of Windows. That means Google has only a certain time period to get their desktop search into the hearts and minds of the public. Porting to Mac and Linux is important because they are growing markets that Microsoft isn’t likely to touch and any advantage is a good thing in this competition.
Don’t get me wrong, Google maps is a very impressive piece of DHTML, but there are already multiple online map services available all around the world and Microsoft have much more money available to them to be used in marketing and the creation of online eye-candy.
Google should concentrate on their key points of superiority, they have the best general search engine, the best online news aggregator, the best webmail service and a huge base of loyal users. They could learn allot from the Mozilla foundation who use their loyal and vocal users to shout from the rooftops to great effect. Press releases are not as affective a marketing technique as being told by your friends about an awesome new application. Something Microsoft themselves are learning to their chagrin while trying to halt the Firefox migration. Google should capitalize on that by creating a portal for Google users to “spread the word” and to suggest new directions and functions that Google should look into. After all, it is those very users that have made Google what it is today. Most importantly Google should be very careful with their image. The “Do no harm” mantra in their company prospectus is of great importance to them as straying from it would seriously affect their loyal user base. Microsoft has not got a great public image any more because they have proven that at the end of the day their will go where the money is and that means they support big business more then home users. (An example would be the Digital Rights Management being slowly embedded into Windows so that record and movie companies will have more say over your actions then you do in the future.) Google needs to balance their clean image with their corporate requirements so as not to drive a wedge between themselves and their best marketers.

This article was posted on Monday, May 30th, 2005 at 10:11 am