BY CHRISTOPHER CAEN
Theory Associates
www.theoryassociates.com
Last week was not a good one for Google. For years they have enjoyed an almost uninterrupted stay at the top of the Internet search mountain. In doing so they have almost become the default front door for the Internet, with many people using that simple Google home page as their default home page for their browsers. For these people, going to Google is almost synonymous with going to the Internet.
But the funny thing about doors is that people often find other ones, and last week proved that once again. First was Yahoo pimping their hearts out for their new best buddy, Firefox. For those of you who do not use this browser, the latest update kicked Google out of the default search box and went with Yahoo instead. Folks have been wondering when the return gesture would appear, and it hit last week, when a prompt suddenly appeared on the Yahoo home page inviting visitors to “upgrade” to the new Firefox.
And then Friday the second shot was fired across Google’s bow. Facebook announced that they were dropping Microsoft Bing from their search and installing their own engine. Part of this was to finally, 10 billion years later, add the ability to search your timeline (ok, maybe not quite that long but damn, really?). This has been rumored for a while, but there is more to it than the ability to track down your friend’s drunken posts from last New Year’s Eve.
No, we are talking once more about doors. In this case we are talking about the front door to the Internet, and the importance of search as the glue that holds it all together. We spoke about this last week with the action around Cortana at Microsoft. The battle is over where you start when you go to the web, and let me tell you, it is starting to get serious.
Take the Facebook announcement for instance. Although certainly a bad break for Bing, it’s even worse for Google. Bing is solidly squatting on second place in the search rankings, and there it will always remain, doomed to stare up at Google for all time. But mobile has scrambled the deck, and opens up the possibility that just maybe, someone else can knock off Google.
And the announcement from Facebook may be the first shot at this. Remember, these are the folks who were tragically late to the mobile party, trailing Twitter at a time when it seemed the latter would own the ranch. Then Facebook came charging back and now Twitter finds itself being run over by not just Facebook, but recently also Instagram. And mobile is becoming the most important front door of all, given the amount of time each of us spends staring at our phones.
So smuggling your own search into the first app we fire up every day sounds downright terrifying if you are Google. In reality, apps are becoming the front door to the web as we know it. We check our sports scores on apps, shop, book airlines, and do everything that used to involve us going to a website…or starting at the Google page.
Add to that the new partnership between Yahoo and Firefox and last week starts to look like an attack on two fronts, with Facebook applying pressure on the mobile front, and Yahoo and Firebox campaigning to retake our browser. It’s not quite Napoleon at the gates of Moscow, but it is starting to get a little more interesting than Google is probably comfortable with.
The reason for this is that these recent moves cut to the very core of what drives Google’s revenue model. Everything they do is based around guessing what you want before you do. Or more importantly, what you want to buy. If they find this stream of data broken apart, or even diverted, then the whole shebang goes sideways in a hurry. It becomes even worse if we are approaching a day where that Google home page stops being everyone’s first step.
In a way, all the dynamics right now are starting to play against Google. The fracturing of our traffic. The rise of apps as a primary navigation tool for web content. Facebook becoming a search engine. None of these are good for Google. Which is why for the first time they are looking over their shoulder at the folks behind them. Because the problem with doors is they have a tendency to suddenly get shut in your face.
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