Following the Yahoo Web Analytics Forum, I was averted to this wonderful piece of content relating to how the Search Engine Market. The Search Engine experts at Bruce Clay have created a histogram of relationships between the Search Engine Companies dating back to November 2000 right up to January this year. What’s interesting is Google comes in at the side and slowly (over a period of two years) takes a central position. Google seems at first to work with Yahoo, forging a results-based relationship, as the model progress Google appear to bypass certain relationships to offer direct services, such as paid search as early as July 2002, when Overture was the strong market leader. Before long Google is building up their position and offering different services to different companies, thus by the end of 2003, some search engines begin to cease to exist and Google becomes the main provider of Search results, both Paid and Organic. I can only assume that companies at that time were given very little choice, to stay in business you had to go through Google, yet what was really happening is that they were postponing the inevitable. Yahoo realised this all too slowly and by the time they had reacted and bought Overture, they had already lost most of their market share. In July 2005, we finally get the two poles of Internet Search appear, and by 2008 the picture looks decisively different than 2000. Google and Yahoo both grew substantially not only because of their ability to develop better technologies, but also through relationship building. They understood who were the important companies to work with and forged relationships with them, learning their technologies, and improving on it, then offering better services to others.
So what next? Well I believe that this is a perfect time for innovation, for smaller, more versatile companies to start flooding the market with new ideas, new ways to search. Of course no one is saying, ‘Go compete with Google!‘, but having a good understanding of innovation cycles, it is now, during a period of market saturation, that we need to plant the seeds of the innovations that will stimulate future business growth.