Google is the 600-pound gorilla: the company that no one wants to see build a competing product. Google dominates many of the markets it enters, whether by building a superior product or acquiring one. But Google isn’t perfect: in some areas, they come out behind. Today, Mashable takes an in-depth look at 10 markets where Google wants to win.
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Google became the Internet’s biggest company by dominating what has become the web’s biggest market segment – online search and paid text links. Google claims a dominating 56% market share in search (Nielsen/NetRatings, May 2007) , but that hasn’t stopped dozens (probably hundreds) of companies from trying to grab a piece of the action. Most of the major search engines also come with their own advertising system, while a few startups actually rely on Google to serve up paid text ads.
Yahoo – Once the web’s biggest search engine, Yahoo still handles a reported 21.5% of searches worldwide. The company’s much anticipated but delayed Panama system for text ads has finally gone live, with early results pointing to better click through rates.
MSN – While rumors of Microsoft acquiring Yahoo have persisted (and been discredited in the same breath), the company’s Live Search product remains number three.
Ask.com – As the crown jewel of the IAC network of sites, Ask.com has received rave reviews, including Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal declaring, “Google deserves credit for universal search, which I’m sure will get better. But Ask’s new design is much more compelling and well worth a try.” Nonetheless, Ask.com is a distant fourth in the race for search dominance.
Eurekster – Social search engine Eurekester is built around users tagging and promoting the best results. The company also markets the “Swicki” platform allowing online communities to create their own vertical search engines for users.
Rollyo – This search engine allows you to create a personalized search engine. With Rollyo, you set up a “search roll” which searches only from sites you specify, in the hope of providing you with only content you trust. Additionally, you can opt to share your search rolls with others.
Quintura – Visual search engine Quintura lets you search visually, presenting you with tag clouds relating to your search terms. As we noted in “Google Labs: A Look Under the Hood”, Google is experimenting with contextual search that shows related searches side-by-side with your original query.
Mahalo – Recently launched Mahalo is a commercialized Wikipedia of sorts, paying people to create pages on thousands of topics and continually update the results. Each content creator also gets their own profile pages where you can see the pages to which they have contributed.
Powerset – Much hyped Powerset hasn’t launched yet, but intends to build a natural language search engine that could change the way people find things online. The company has raised significant venture capital that has already valued PowerSet at more than $40 million.
Wikiasari – As part of his for-profit company, Wikia, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales looks to create the world’s largest human-powered search engine. The project is still in development, but with Wikipedia now one of the world’s largest web sites, it has an opportunity to grab a piece of the market.
Image Search – In addition to text queries, Google faces a variety of competitors in image search, including all of the usual suspects plus upstarts like Pixsy, Picsearch, and Yotophoto. We previously covered the image search competitors after Google proved victorious in a court battle over the thumbnailing of images.
Our Take: Google is the dominant player here, but we should remember that less than a decade ago, Yahoo owned search. Competition from both big web companies and well-funded startups will force Google to remain focused on continuing to innovate in search.
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With AdWords the most dominant player in paid search, Google is looking to take the same system of aligning buyers and sellers to other forms of advertising, including web banner ads, radio, print, and mobile. Through acquisitions and several homegrown initiatives, the company is now lined up against dozens of other companies competing for ad dollars both online and off.
Contextual Advertising
Thousands of companies have built a business around Google’s contextual advertising platform that matches text ads to web site content. While AdSense dominates this market, all of the big players have competing offerings, as well as a few specialty outfits. In its most recent quarter, AdSense accounted for $1.35 billion in revenue for Google.
Yahoo Publisher Network – YPN still claims to be in Beta, but offers a very similar product to AdSense. Publishers create an account and cut and paste code to their site, and Yahoo serves up ads relating to the content of the page.
MSN AdCenter – Microsoft offers its AdCenter platform to advertisers looking for exposure in Microsoft Live searches and on other MSN Properties. Currently Microsoft does not provide an open system for other web sites to serve AdCenter ads, although the company does sell advertising for Facebook. Meanwhile, Google powers the search and contextual advertising on MySpace.
Ask.com Sponsored Listings – Ask.com recently launched an AdSense competitor, going after one of Google’s perceived weaknesses – a lack of transparency in terms of telling publishers what their cut of revenue is.
MIVA – Formerly known as FindWhat.com, a popular search engine in the first Internet boom, MIVA focuses on a variety of advertising options for publishers, including contextual product MIVA MC.
Kanoodle – Kanoodle offers a solution for publishers that want to run ads next to their own search results. It’s a subsidiary of Seavast, an online marketing conglomerate.
AdBrite – Offering a marketplace of sorts, AdBrite allows publishers to place text ads on their site and have advertisers buy them directly at a fixed price. They also allow you to set a floor price and run ads from a competing network (such as AdSense) when that price can’t be beaten.
Our Take: Until someone proves they can pay more than Google and still make a profit, AdSense will likely be the preferred contextual ad provider for Web publishers. However, there are only so many ads to go around, so there is also a place for competitors with strong offerings.
Online Display Advertising
With its acquisition of DoubleClick in April, Google set off a buying spree in the online ad space. In the weeks that followed, Yahoo snapped up Right Media, Microsoft bought aQuantive, and 24/7 Real Media was taken out by WPP Group. In addition to the DoubleClick purchase, Google has increasingly been integrating graphical advertising into its AdSense platform for web publishers. While it remains to be seen how exactly Google will integrate DoubleClick, the company is positioned to take a big slice of the online display advertising market, alongside these competitors:
Right Media – Acquired by Yahoo for $680 million, Right Media offers web publishers both a web-based ad management system and a marketplace called RMX Direct where advertisers can compete for publisher inventory.
aQuantive – The biggest acquisition in the history of Microsoft, aQuantive is the parent company of several online advertising outfits, including Razorfish, Atlas, and Drive. The company offers both technology for managing advertising and services for aligning buyers with web publishers.
Advertising.com – AOL was actually one of the first big players to move in on display ad networks, acquiring Advertising.com in 2004 for $435 million, a steal given the price tags of recent online advertising deals. Advertising.com claims their network of publishers reaches more than 85% of online users.
Valueclick – The biggest remaining independent ad network, Valueclick owns a wide variety of online ad properties, including Fastclick (banner ads), Commission Junction (affiliate advertising), and PriceRunner (comparison shopping). Wall Street currently values the company at $3 billion.
Tribal Fusion – Tribal Fusion is an ad network serving an estimated 19 billion monthly impressions. They provide advertisers with a variety of topical channels on which to target their ads.
24/7 Real Media – A provider of both technology and one of the Web’s largest banner advertising networks, 24/7 Real Media was acquired by global advertising agency WPP Group in May for $649 million. The company was founded all the way back in 1994.
Our Take: DoubleClick works with most of the web’s largest publishers, providing Google with new relationships to not only sell display ads, but increase AdWords usage. Google’s main competitors have tried to keep up, but the company has clearly positioned itself to take the lead in this category.
Other Ad Formats – Broadcast, Print, In-Game
In print, Google has extended its AdWords platform to allow you to bid on ads in major newspapers. In broadcast, Google acquired dMarc, a company that aligns radio advertisers and stations. For in-game advertising, the company acquired AdScape, a small startup. Competitors abound in all three segments, primarily in the form of the status quo of buying ads directly from the newspapers and radio stations with whom you want to advertise. Meanwhile, here is how a few key players are attacking these markets:
Microsoft – In May, Microsoft acquired Massive Incorporated, which has deals with major gaming companies like Electronic Arts to provide in-game ads.
IGA Worldwide – The largest independent in-game ad network, IGA places ads in popular titles like Counter Strike and works with major advertisers like T-Mobile and Intel.
Linden Labs – As the operator of virtual world Second Life, Linden Labs has attracted major brands like Pontiac, Dell, and Coca Cola to its “game” with mixed results, including several incidents of virtual vandalism.
Bid4Spots – An online auction of sorts for last minute buying of radio advertising across the US.
SWMX Radio – Provides tools that allow radio stations to manage their advertising inventory, while offering a marketplace for advertisers to buy air time.
Newspaper National Network – Jointly owned by 24 of the nation’s largest newspapers and the Newspaper Association of America, Newspaper National Network connects advertisers directly with some of the largest newspapers in the US. The company also helps sell inventory for newspaper’s online versions.
Nationwide Newspapers – An ad agency specializing in placement of both display and classified ads in newspapers across the US, including mailers like the Penny Saver and college newspapers. Nationwide Newspapers claims a circulation of up to 60 million papers weekly.
Our Take: As the manufacturer of Xbox, Microsoft has a leg up on in-game advertising. Meanwhile, print and broadcast are notoriously slow to adopt new technologies, so it will likely take Google some time to gain traction in this area, although acquiring dMarc certainly gave them a head start. With Google clearly intent on spreading its advertising platform to the offline world, more acquisitions are likely in the space.
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Google responded to the rather lackluster performance of homegrown Google Video by purchasing market leader YouTube for $1.6 billion in November 2006. While Google also inherited the legal headaches including a $1 billion lawsuit from Viacom, the purchase instantly made Google the #1 player in online video by a landslide. Nonetheless, dozens of companies have received funding in this space, and the other big players have also launched competing products:
Metacafe – This startup offers a similar video sharing experience to YouTube, with a focus on the male audience. Metacafe has been a rumored acquisition target of Microsoft and Yahoo.
MySpace Video – MySpace launched its own video sharing service last year that integrates tightly with user profiles, allowing users to instantly add videos to their space with no need for copying and pasting embed codes. Recently, this became MySpaceTV, which has been labeled as a “YouTube clone”.
Yahoo Video – Yahoo offers a fairly standard video sharing service with tagging, favorites, featured videos, etc. Yahoo also acquired online video editing service JumpCut in September ’06.
Blip.tv – Blip.tv is designed for serious video bloggers, offering tools for uploading high quality video, inserting ads, and maintaining a feed so fans can keep up with your show.
Revver – Originally Revver was the first video site to offer a revenue share with users, but others including YouTube have since followed suit. Beyond the financial arrangements, Revver offers a fairly standard video sharing experience, showcasing recent videos, most watched, and editor’s picks.
Dailymotion – One of the most popular video sites (particularly in France), Dailymotion is comprised of a variety of channels that users can join, such as Extreme Sports, Funny, and Webcam. The site also includes privacy options for sharing videos with select family and friends.
See also: Video Toolbox: 150+ Online Video Tools and Resources
Our Take: While Google will spend plenty of time in the court room over copyright issues on YouTube, the company has the financial strength to fight off just about any lawsuit thrown its way and preserve a dominant position in online video. Meanwhile, niche players like Blip.tv have an opportunity to take advantage of the growing market for high quality user generated content.
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Google was ahead of the game with blogging, acquiring Pyra Labs, parent company of Blogger, back in 2003. Last month, Google acquired FeedBurner, which is far away the dominant player in RSS feed management. Rounding out Google’s efforts to dominate the blogosphere is Blog Search, which the company developed in-house. While FeedBurner is the industry standard for feed management, there are dozens of blog software and search options. Here are a few key competitors:
WordPress – The preferred software package for serious bloggers, WordPress offers both an installable version at wordpress.org and a hosted product at wordpress.com. The company maintains an open platform allowing third-party developers to create plugins.
Six Apart – The biggest independent blog company, Six Apart owns the hosted Typepad platform, the installable Movable Type software package, the community-focused LiveJournal, and the recently launched Vox personal publishing solution.
Technorati – The largest search engine focused exclusively on blogs, Technorati monitors, organizes, and ranks the authority of the blogosphere. Recently, the site has had its share of bumps (technical glitches, key staff departures, etc.), and a recent move towards multimedia has taken the focus off the core product.
Sphere – This blog search engine also offers the popular “Sphere It” widget that allows bloggers to show related blogs from around the web on their sites, and earn a share of the revenue on advertising.
Pheedo – As Google looks to monetize FeedBurner, they go up against Pheedo, who specializes in RSS advertising. Pheedo is compatible with most feed management services, including FeedBurner, Typepad, and WordPress.
Our Take: News out of Blogger has been nearly non-existent since Google acquired it, and Blog Search is not nearly as reliable as Google’s main search engine. FeedBurner is dominant in RSS, but advertisers still have plenty of options for feed-based advertising. The blogosphere remains a healthy area for competition.
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Recently making headlines with its purchase of GrandCentral, mobile is an area Google has had its eyes on for a while. Google Labs features GOOG411, which goes up against a variety of companies looking to transition paid 411 services into an advertising-based model, while the company has also made acquisitions in the space including AdScape Media and Dodgeball. Here are some key players Google is up against for domination on your handset:
Jingle Networks – As the first mover in the space with 1-800-FREE-411, Jingle Networks is already up to a reported 3% of market share for 411 volume. GOOG411 is still in Google Labs, but presumably will use an AdWords-inspired system to allow advertisers access to user’s 411 queries.
Yahoo Mobile! – Yahoo has made major efforts in mobile, offering a comprehensive application designed for cell phones and PDAs. Yahoo! Go adds mobile widgets to the equation.
MSN Mobile – Microsoft offers a free mobile version of its search and popular web sites. Weather, news, sports, movie times, and more are all available via MSN Mobile.
InfoSpace – InfoSpace specializes in mobile content, providing applications for search, content, and commerce that are typically private labeled by other brands and carriers. The company claims more than 250 million WAP page views per month.
VoIP – While the GrandCentral acquisition gave Google a unique offering, dozens of other startups are creating innovative applications that will keep Google on its toes. Check out “The 7 Most Disruptive VoIP Services” for a few prime examples.
Our Take: Adoption of the mobile Internet in the US trails Europe and Asia, leaving the space wide open. Yahoo has a head start here, while specialists like InfoSpace and the VoIP value-added service companies know the market better than anyone. However, GOOG411 and Google SMS (search by text message) offer a compelling user experience that is perfect for advertising.
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Google Personalized Home has become iGoogle, going up against the likes of My Yahoo!, Netvibes, PageFlakes, and dozens of other companies that want you to start your online experience with them. We list a few of the top competitors here, but you should also check out “14 Personalized Homepages Compared, Feature by Feature” to get an overall view of the innovation taking place in this market.
My Yahoo! – The original dominant portal, Yahoo can still claim the most widely used start page on the web. The company has continued to upgrade the service in hopes of retaining users, adding the ability to drag and drop content items, subscribe to RSS feeds, and integrate other Yahoo services like mail, weather, and finance.
AOL – While its subscriber base continues to dwindle quarter by quarter, millions of people still start their Internet experience by signing on to AOL. However, Google powers AOL’s search, and Google took a 5 percent stake in the company back in 2005.
My Netscape – One of the early big names on the Internet, Netscape has moved on to become a Digg clone and a start page provider. The site still gets considerable traffic thanks to its iconic brand and AOL relationship.
Netvibes – The hottest startup in the start page space, Netvibes provides a beautiful drag and drop interface for organizing your start page content, and also allows you to pull in widgets from third-parties. The company recently launched Netvibes Universes, private label versions of its start page product that other companies like The Washington Post and USA Today offer to their users.
Our Take: If it wasn’t clear already, iGoogle solidifies Google’s quest to be more than a search engine and take up more minutes of the user’s online time. While the startups have proven most innovative in this space, Google can use its massive reach and brand cache to convert users to iGoogle. However, Yahoo has the advantage of more than a decade of start page experience, and convincing the average user to invest a few hours in changing services isn’t easy.
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While Gmail dubiously maintains its “Beta” tag, Google’s email service put the company on the map in being much more than a search engine and going after the big boys. The company has also launched Gtalk in an effort to join the instant messaging space, though the product lags behind competitors in adoption. Maintaining webmail and instant messaging services requires massive amounts of manpower and hardware, making it for the most part a four-way race between the big boys: Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL.
AOL – Millions of people remain attached to their AOL email addresses. AOL has made it easy to do, allowing users to keep their address even if they cancel their AOL accounts. This makes AOL.com’s webmail product one of the more popular, albeit less advanced email services. Meanwhile, AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) is a major player in IM, particularly in the US.
MSN – Microsoft owns the original big boy in webmail – Hotmail – which recently received a major facelift and became Windows Live Hotmail (see: “Face Off: Windows Live Hotmail versus Gmail”). MSN Messenger has a huge user base globally.
Yahoo! – Yahoo Mail recently upgraded to offer an Outlook-like interface that includes the ability to chat with Yahoo Messenger buddies from within your account (Gmail does this with Gtalk). Yahoo’s IM product is among the top commercially-run products.
Our Take: Don’t let the market share numbers deceive you; Google is a serious player in communications. The other three players have a head start thanks to longevity, but Gmail has become the email provider of choice for professionals, thanks to a clean interface, effective spam filtering, and offering the most storage space. Meanwhile, Gtalk faces a slightly bigger challenge, since users have entrenched buddy lists with the other services that make changing a hassle.
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While it can be argued that YouTube is one of the world’s biggest social networking sites in addition to being the #1 video site, Google has been relatively quiet in the space. Friendster passed on a rumored $30 million Google bid back at the dawn of the social networking boom, while homegrown Orkut has enjoyed some success, primarily in South America. Readers of Mashable are no strangers to the hundreds of social networks looking to gain users, or at least, get acquired by Google.
Facebook – The hottest social network of ’07, Yahoo reportedly passed on buying Facebook for $1 billion last year, a bargain by today’s standards. With the Facebook Platform all the rage right now and an advertising deal with Microsoft, Google may be starting to feel it backed the wrong horse …
MySpace – News Corp made the savvy purchase of MySpace for $580 million back in 2005, just when the social networking leader was at the height of its exponential growth. The site has lost its swagger to Facebook in recent months, but still remains the biggest by far.
Bebo – Extremely popular in the UK, Bebo has been on the rise in ’07. It has also been the subject of acquisition rumors with Yahoo. The site receives praise for its privacy options.
AIM Pages – AOL made the logical move of extending AIM to include social networking through AIM Pages, enjoying moderate but not phenomenal success.
Windows Live Spaces – Microsoft’s social networking play is very youth-oriented, providing simple blogs and profiles to MSN users.
Yahoo! 360 – Yahoo’s biggest social networking effort has been criticized for not doing enough to integrate other Yahoo services and overlapping too much with other Yahoo products. The lack of success may be why Yahoo is always at the top of the rumored buyers list when other social networks go up for sale.
Our Take: The social networking space has proven fickle in its early history, with Friendster the early leader, MySpace the current dominant player, and Facebook on the rise looking to unseat MySpace. With YouTube already under its roof and one of the deepest pocketbooks in the industry, Google can sit back and wait for the right time to acquire one of the top social networks.
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Google was relatively early to jump on the photo sharing bandwagon with the 2004 acquisition of Picasa, but the service has since been surpassed by rivals that do a better job of integrating with blogs and social networks. Here are the prime players:
Flickr – One of the darlings of Web 2.0, Yahoo deserves praise for acquiring Flickr in early 2005 before valuations became far steeper. The site is a favorite of techies and serious photographers, and is moving towards mainstream adoption as Yahoo closes Yahoo Photos in favor of Flickr.
Photobucket – By offering a free place to store photos that can be embedded on social networks, Photobucket became one of the most highly trafficked sites on the Web. While MySpace briefly blocked Photobucket, it recently decided to acquire the company for an estimated $250 million.
Zooomr – This startup receives a lot of hype, but is also becoming the choice of some high end photographers and giving Flickr some competition. We compared the two in “Face-off: Flickr versus Zooomr Mark III” after Zooomr’s latest round of enhancements.
BayImg – The Pirate Bay provides free uncensored image hosting for files up to 100MB. Given the big player’s need to appease advertisers by removing offensive content, it’s an interesting alternative that has some traction.
For a look at dozens of other players in the online photo space, check out “90+ Online Photography Tools and Resources”.
Our Take: With a fairly dominant image search product, Google doesn’t really need to move into the high maintenance area of photo storage and sharing. However, with the company expanding into display advertising, which is favored on many photo sharing sites, Google may become interested should the right company become available.
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With the acquisition of Writely, which has since been merged into Google Docs & Spreadsheets, and the launch of a PowerPoint competitor imminent, version 1 of the Google office suite is nearly complete. While the company has a long way to go to match the feature set of the ever dominant Microsoft Office, it has Redmond moving fast to market web-based versions of its core products. Several startups are also working on word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software to compete with Microsoft.
Microsoft – With Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Outlook the entrenched franchises of nearly every personal computer on earth, Microsoft Office is a mighty foe to take on. While it is by no means Google’s core business yet, they are clearly putting pressure on Microsoft to remain innovative in the office arena.
Zoho – This well-funded startup has a full office suite of its own, with products including Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, and Zoho Show. Many of the company’s products are free.
Open Office – The free, open source office project that originates with Microsoft foe Sun Microsystems includes word processing, spreadsheets, presentations and more, and is designed to be compatible with as many operating systems and programs as possible.
Our Take: Microsoft’s dominance in office software stems from dominance in operating systems, a market it still controls. However, Google Docs & Spreadsheets’ web-based, collaborative approach is very lightweight and useful for certain tasks. While it will take years to build a product that offers the full functionality of Microsoft Office, Google is the best-positioned company by far to build a viable competitor if it wants to.
THE FUTURE
As the most watched, scrutinized, and reported-on company in the web space, Google’s every move is analyzed by competitors big and small. Its rapid expansion into areas beyond search and seemingly insatiable appetite for acquisitions has the company strongly positioned to dominate numerous key parts of the Internet. However, we should be reminded that not everything Google touches turns to gold; for example, the demise of Google Answers and the demotion of Froogle. Stay tuned for what are sure to be hundreds of announcements in the years to come.
Measuring the effect of online marketing and PR efforts is essential for both understanding the return on investment but also for feedback that will improve subsequent efforts. 
