Rudelle Blogging

Google impressive financial quarterly results seem to confirm the tremendous power of its model. Furthermore, despite his increasing domination on the Internet, Google manages to still be perceived as a cool user friendly start-up, as opposed to Microsoft often depicted as the Big Evil.
However on a closer look, Google situation is somewhat fragile. First of all, 99% of its revenues come from advertising, and above all from AdWord. On the other hand, AdSense is facing a more challenging situation in terms of returns. Outside the comfortable cocoon of its search engine, Google indeed has some serious difficulties to generate actual efficient ads returns. AdSense semantic engine is regularly pointed out to show poor outputs, resulting in disappointing click through and transformation rates.
Furthermore, so far, all attempts of Google to diversify were failures. This includes in particular video, email, cartography, storage or shopping guide. In these areas, Google has not been capable to grab a significant market share compared to its main competitors. For video, the failure of Google Video has even forced them to acquire YouTube. This acquisition has also made Google to discover the charming world of copyright infringements.
Eventually, the power of Google is due mainly to its amazing market share in search. Its domination in this area is particularly strong in Europe. The question is therefore: can anyone ever challenge Google search domination?
Google’s power is due to the fact that the search industry has not evolved in the last seven years. No one has indeed succeeded to come out with any disruptive technology. Still, disappointing experience of search engines shows that some serious improvement should be expected sometime down the road. We all experience ourselves that any search results are not exploitable.
The day a brilliant start-up will invent a revolutionary approach, the position of Google will soon become uncomfortable. Either Google will manage to copy very quickly the new algorithm of the intruder, or the shake-up will soon proved very serious. Indeed, nothing is less sticky that a search engine. Barriers to change are pretty low. In two clicks, you can loose a user you had for years. Irony is that it's precisely this way Google started his irresistible growth in the early days, passing by incumbents like Yahoo! who were incapable to react.