Can Google's success be retained?

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It got me thinking when Business Week raised the question, 'Can Google stay on top of the web?' If you think about it, anyone who uses Google, takes it for granted. What we have to hope though, is that Google aren't taking their own success for granted.

Google may currently be the number one search engine, the best known of all the ones out there, yet there are many other sites who are hot on its heels to become the top site on theinternet.

Every day on Google, there are 2.5 billion searches made, showing how the some 720 million people worldwide, rely on Google to search for just about anything they can think of.

Despite this success, Google engineers are still spending their time looking at ways that they can improve. They know that although they are thepublic's favourite, there are still times when a search finds an irrelevant site, or a search query heralds no results at all.

They also know that every time someone doesn't find the result they want, it means someone is less likely to click on ads-the source of nearly all of Google's US$22 billion in revenues last year-and they are more likely to try another search engine.

Whereas before, Google was the clear favourite, other search engines have recently emerged from the shadows. Microsoft's new Bing search engine picked up 1.5 percentage points of market share in August to hit 9.5 percent, according to market researcher Hitwise, while Google's share fell from 71.4 percent to 70.2 percent. Bing's gain is partly thanks to a US$100 million marketing blitz complete with television ads knocking Google every way it could. Microsoft's pending deal for Bing to become Yahoo's underlying search engine, creating a combined entity with 27 percent market share, could produce Google's first sizable competitor in years.

Moving away from the more specialised search engine, Google is facing competition from other areas. This competition is coming from Twitter,Facebook, and Wolfram Alpha, a "knowledge engine" which attempts to answer factual queries in a more comprehensive way. These and other companies are offering search services in such specialized areas as breaking news, updates from friends, and scientific research. Twitter, for instance, has become a go-to site for finding out about plane crashes and other news that Google's computers haven't yet provided links to.

"Google's very good at searching content as if it's out of a library," says Kimbal Musk, chief executive of OneRiot, a search startup for real-time posts and news from Twitter, Digg, and other social sites. "Twitter lets people know another kind of search is possible."

The social network sites being used to search for items of news will no doubt be a worry to Google, especially as it's been revealed that Twitter now has 55 million monthly visitors, and Facebook has 300 million.

It appears that because of Google's size and success, more people are looking at ways to bring it down. In the past year the company has been the target of three US antitrust inquiries and one in Italy. On 18 September, the Justice Dept. said Google's controversial settlement with authors and publishers, which would have allowed it to scan and sell certain books, must be changed to avoid breaking antitrust laws.

As well as that, even Google's own paying customers-advertisers and ad agencies-say they're eager for alternatives to blunt Google's power.

"We're still investing a lot in search," says Google CEO Eric Schmidt in an interview.

Of late, Google has released several different features that suggest it's paying close attention to the competition. One, called Search Options, opens up a pane on the left side of the Google page that allows searchers to narrow queries by such categories as videos, books, or time. With this, it looks like they've been looking closely at Twitter. Users can select the past 24 hours or even more recent results. Another feature, Google Squared, organizes information on topics, such as dog breeds, into a table with descriptions, photos, and more, this appears to be echoing Wolfram Alpha.

Each year, Google conducts some 5,000 experiments on formulas to the site, and they make up to 500 changes per year to the site. Some are obvious changes, while some are small, that wouldn't be apparent.

As long as Google is determined to continue improving their search engine, they should be able to stay on top, they will just need to be looking overthier shoulder to see how close their competitors are getting.

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