Over the years we have embraced Google as our primary search engine – all credit to the quality of search results it produces. Not only are we dependent on Google for search results, we also use various other Google services ‘day in day out’. The extent to which these services are now entwined with our lives is so much so that imaging a life without Google is sometimes difficult.

Search marketing discussions are mostly centered on Google, and more often than not the deliberations drift toward Google’s near monopolistic search market dominance. Google, as you would know, was not always the market leader and has worked hard to become one – a position well earned. MSN and Yahoo (its nearest competitors) made umpteen efforts to reclaim some market share but failed miserably each time. Some brand new search engines, especially CUIL, were touted to be ‘Google Killer’ but failed to impress searchers. And as long as users don’t feel the need to switch, Google will continue to dominate the search marketing arena.

As search marketing professionals, operating in an industry having one dominant player is like a ‘double edged’ sword and here’s why:

  • Optimizing for a single search engine is far easier than optimizing for multiple search engines. However competition is much fierce in case of a dominant search engine with respect to multiple competitive search engines.
  • Commanding top slots in the dominant search engine will equate to huge traffic (conversion is a different story altogether). On the other hand, losing rankings in the dominant search engine can ruin your online business. This risk is spread out in multiple competitive search engines scenario.
  • It is comparatively easy to keep up with algorithmic changes when the focus is on the dominant search engine. On the contrary, failure to do so could have disastrous consequences for the online business you are marketing. Multiple search engines would mean keeping track of all of them simultaneously.

A monopolistic search market may have some advantages to its credit, but looking at the holistic picture we strongly believe that competition is what we need. Competition is not always bad and it definitely isn’t going to be bad for search marketing industry in the given circumstances. Again, we have reasons to say so:

  • The dominant player can influence pricing easily making online marketing expensive and significantly diminish ROI. Multi player markets stay competitive in terms of pricing as each player tries to maintain market share and position.
  • Multiple search engines will create additional opportunities and avenues to promote the website, and give online businesses a much wider reach. Search marketers will have more choices and will be in the position make the appropriate ones.
  • Multiple search engines would invariably result in competition amongst online businesses being distributed. This would make competition less fierce and a wee bit easy to obtain top positions.
  • Monopolies can dictate market share and impose unfair sanctions according to their ‘will and fancy’. Doing so in market equally dominated by multiple players would mean loss in market share, and therefore is restricted.
  • A monopolistic market condition will also kill innovation. The dominant player will not have the urge/reason to evolve for the better and would be a great loss for all of us.

We sincerely hope that this New Year would witness more search engines (the existing ones included) ready to raise the bar, and give Google some serious competition. The more competing search engines we have the better it is for the overall landscape.

We don’t want to be left without choice, do we?