Tonight from Market Place was a great story about Google’s movement into the top 6 stocks on the NYSE. Prior to today, there were only five stocks on the New York Stock Exchange that were above $600 per share, Google has joined to make it six.
Instead of focusing on the upswing on the stock, Kai Ryssdal (host pictured above) and Brian Cooley (from CNet) looked at what Google’s strengths and weaknesses are.
Here are some juicy tidbits from the story:
Brian Cooley
Search is the core business, they do it really well and they really revolutionized it. And secondly… they sold against it really well.There is nothing in their revenue picture that I know of that casts a dark cloud.
Google… finding what I want and then interacting with it is their whole base. Right now, they are the taste maker for the sector they occupy.
Kai Ryssdal
Let’s get to the down side though, and elaborate on that for me, for a minute. What’s it going to be that’s going to make this company stumble?Brian Cooley
What Google has to focus on next is connecting the dots on other platforms. That’s one of the keys. In the car, on the cell phone or smart phone, in front of the television. I don’t use Google much in those places. That field is still open for someone to come in and be the killer app of that space. But also, today when you go to get your Google results, there is a good and a bad thing that happens all at once. You type in your term, you hit enter and it comes back and says 674,323 results, and you go “Great, a plethora of stuff”. But that’s also the problem. I know they know this at Google that this is a failed algorithm. Anything that returns 674,000 results on something that I am looking for is broken. They have to fix that.Someone is going to fix it, someone is going to get search so elegant and so focused that I’ll get eight results and I’ll every one of them. That’s what I really want. So, that’s the thing that Google needs to be first at. Otherwise they would very quickly be relegated to second class status if someone else beats them to it.
WOW! What an unbelievable turn of events. On one hand, Google is an elitist and on the other, Google is really just a second class engine that is just clinging on.
What do you think? Is Google that close to demise?
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Google search is dead. Brian Cooley hit the nail on the head. I’ve started using Yahoo and MSN for all product or service searches and find that they return the most relevant “top ten” results.
As an SEO and web designer, what the engines are doing is pretty important to me for my cleints. Googles results are slipping, to the poijnt were anyone knows that past the frist 10 pages or so of results, it rapidly degenerates. But the top 10 results are slipping as well , with far too many paid links and ads. I’ts funny Google is death on paid links, yet their own results are full of them. With often a match of less than 10%. so useablity is suffering. If the engines want the relusts to be relavant, paid links of any kind, have to go.
Glenn,
Thank you for your comment. If anyone is in the driver’s seat on relevancy it is Google. They have the traffic, but what they do with it is totally up to them. It remains to be seen, will they be able to adjust to please your needs in search?
I guess we will see!
Esta,
Google hasn’t made a major adjustment to ranking results in some time. Relevancy is in the eye of the searcher. As Brian stated in the story, Google is selling against their search platform that was considered as the most relevant a few years back to get users to their other services that they added on, like gmail, blogger, youtube and such. Now that they have the user’s attention, they are keeping them there because of everything else.
Will this keep them on top? I can’t tell, but like my response to Glenn, Google is in the driver’s seat… will they maintain control or slide off the track?
Thanks for the comment!
For our purposes of internet research Google flops. The first page results are often off topic or some little directory or adsense sites. We use MSN and Yahoo for more on topic results and this saves time.
Tarheel,
Thanks for the comment. Google has definitely been viewed (at least more recently) that the results have been slipping in the relevancy category.