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Google Rivals

Before Yahoo! switched to its own results early in 2004 it was estimated that Google's total share of web searches was close to 80% because in addition to Yahoo! Google supplies results to AOL, AskJeeves and Alexa.

Google's much anticipated IPO, while trying to stay true to the company's philosophy, attracted a lot of criticism, especially from pundits. Rather than go down the traditional IPO route with an investment bank issuing a limited number of shares to selected clients who then make a killing on a first day bounce in the share price, Google decided to stage an auction. First of all Google discovered that it may have illegally issued staff with shares, it then had to raise the allocation of shares following the settlement of a patent lawsuit with Yahoo! concerning the Adwords technology. The run up to the launch is supposed to be a quiet period but Google then ran foul of the Securities and Exchange Commission after an interview with the founders was published in Playboy magazine. Finally the company was forced to scale back the offering and reduce the target share price. In the end things went better than expected with the shares opening at just over $100 on the 19th August, 2004. An 18% increase on the offer price.

The main threat to Google is probably Microsoft which intends to include search technology in the next release of its operating system, codenamed Longhorn, in 2006. Microsoft's search technology will seamlessly integrate local and remote search on a computer (firms such as Blinx.com already offer this if users download a small piece of software). Remote searches will be supported by Microsoft's own search engine. In a bid to preempt Microsoft and other competitors Google has recently launched a preview of their own Desktop Search Tool <http://desktop.google.com/>. This widget presents desktop search as another Google tab. Currently only Internet Explorer and Windows XP and 2000 with service pack 3 are supported. It seems particularly good at indexing Microsoft documents, even prying inside password protected files. The results are presented just like normal Google search results and it can even show cached versions of files and thread messages and emails. As with Gmail the tool has raised concerns about privacy, especially the mixing of local and remote search results.

Microsoft Search has recently undergone a revamp which Microsoft claims will make it a Google killer. The relevance of results obtained early in the beta test are somewhat disappointing. It will interesting to see just how many security problems integrated search results introduce to Microsoft's operating system and whether Google Desktop Search can overcome its own privacy issues. Still with effective control over the majority of desktop operating systems Microsoft are a serious competitor even if early versions of their product turn out to be mediocre.

Google Rivals

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