[Lilug] The Elephant in the Room: Google Monoculture

[Justin Dearing]

Some interesting points. Although, I think eventually google will
collapse under its own weight like most monopolies do if left to their
own devices. Rome fell to the barbarians. Ironically, the barbarians
eventually called themselves the Holy Roman empire even though they
were neither very Roman nor very Holy.

Eventually google will fat and lazy that we will all run a completely
decentralized search engine running through freenet on virtualbox
instances of the hurd or something else no one else could have
predicted.

Sent to you by Justin Dearing via Google Reader: The Elephant in the
Room: Google Monoculture via Coding Horror by Jeff Atwood on 2/9/09
I was browsing the sessions at an upcoming Search Conference, which
describes itself thusly:
The way to online success is through being easily found in search
engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Live Search. While
developers have historically thought of search as a marketing activity,
technical architecture has now become critical for search success.
Anyone else see the elephant in the room, there? No?

Just two weeks after we launched Stack Overflow, I mentioned that
search engines already made up 50% of our traffic. Well, not so much
search engines as search engine:
I try to be politically correct in discussing web search, avoiding the
g-word whenever possible, desperately attempting to preserve the
illusion that web search is actually a competitive market. But it's
becoming a transparent and cruel joke at this point. When we say "web
search" we mean one thing, and one thing only: Google. Rich Skrenta
explains:

I'm not a professional analyst, and my approach here is pretty
back-of-the-napkin. Still, it confirms what those of us in the search
industry have known for a long time.
The New York Times, for instance, gets nearly 6 times as much traffic
from Google as it does from Yahoo. Tripadvisor gets 8 times as much
traffic from Google vs. Yahoo.
Even Yahoo's own sites are no different. While it receives a greater
fraction of Yahoo search traffic than average, Yahoo's own flickr
service gets 2.4 times as much traffic from Google as it does from
Yahoo.
My favorite example: According to Hitwise, [ex] Yahoo blogger Jeremy
Zawodny gets 92% of his inbound search traffic from Google, and only
2.7% from Yahoo.



That was written almost two years ago. Guess which way those numbers
have gone since then?
Now that Stack Overflow has been chugging right along for almost six
months, allow me to share the last month of our own data. Currently,
83% of our total traffic is from search engines, or rather, one
particular search engine:
Search EngineVisits Google3,417,919 Yahoo9,779 Live5,638 Search2,961
AOL1,274 Ask1,186 MSN1,177 Altavista202 Yandex191 Seznam103
Those 6x and 8x numbers that Rich quoted two years ago seem awfully
quaint now. Google delivers 350x the traffic to Stack Overflow that the
next best so-called "search engine" does. Three hundred and fifty times!
Now, I don't claim that Stack Overflow is representative of every site
on the internet -- obviously it isn't. It's a site for programmers. And
let me be absolutely crystal clear that I have no problem at all with
Google. That said, I find it profoundly disturbing that if every other
search engine in the world shut down tomorrow, our website's traffic
would be effectively unchanged. That's downright scary.
Yes, I like Google. Yes, Google works great and has been my homepage
for about eight years now. Google nailed search, and they deserve the
leadership position they've earned. But where's the healthy
competition? Where's the incentive for Google to improve? All I see is
a large and growing monoculture that acts as the start page for the
internet.
I'm a little surprised all the people who were so up in arms about the
Microsoft "monopoly" ten years ago aren't out in the streets today
lighting torches and sharpening their pitchforks to go after Google.
Does the fact that Google's products are mostly free and ad-supported
somehow exempt it from the same scrutiny? Isn't anyone else concerned
that Google, even with the best of "don't be evil" intentions, has
become more master than servant?
Calling the current state of search engine competition a horse race is
an insult to horse races. No, what we have here is a one horse race
where all the other horses were shipped off to glue factories years
ago. Forget "search conference", you should be throwing a "Google
conference", because there's no difference.
I don't know. Maybe that's OK. But it does mean that if Google, for
whatever reason, decided to remove you from its search results, your
website no longer exists. At least not as a viable business, anyway.
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