Let's face it: Google scares us. The search giant has been so dominant in the past decade that we have grown to regard it with awe and a bit of trepidation, the way we would a very large dog with big
fangs who hasn't bitten us as of now. You might love dogs, and you might think this particular dog is awesome, but you'd still get nervous if someone tied a steak to your chest.
When you
possess extraordinary size and power, you have two options: you can use it to smash anyone who gets in your way, or you can make a conscious effort to be gentler than others. You may disagree, but I
believe the latter option is a better long-term strategy -- especially, as Googlers themselves have pointed out, when your competition is only a click away.
But, really, why should Google
care? After all, they've got an unparalleled dominance of our dinosaur brains. When I want to
visit a search engine, my habit of going directly to Google is so ingrained it's virtually impossible to overturn. I'd have to find out that they were torturing fluffy bunnies or something.
advertisement
advertisement
But the future of search -- or where search has its greatest growth potential -- isn't on the Web site. It's contextual. It's mobile. It integrates real time and the social graph, and it means you're
the de facto choice when someone launches their browser or right-clicks on a phrase in a blog post.
Most important, the future of search relies on partnerships. And potential partners seem to
be thinking they'd be better off teaming up with a dog that's not quite so big.
Yelp walked away from a deal with
Google at the end of December. The CEO of AOL is hinting about a switch to Microsoft as search partner is in the
foreseeable future. Every Hewlett-Packard sold henceforth will use Bing as its default search
engine. And we may not know the details of why contract negotiations broke down between Google and the Associated Press, but apparently the disconnect was big enough that the AP would rather not appear on Google News at all.
These partners are tiny compared to Google, some of them getting smaller all the time. But they're important, because the future of search is in online
omnipresence.
We are growing to expect functionality on tap: we want to access our search results from any screen, any app, any site, any text box. I gave up using the search bar on the
browser once I realized I could just type my query into the address bar. So when I can search from anywhere, and when enough of those anywheres have partnered with Microsoft instead of Google, then
there's a problem in Mountain View.
Google will never be unseated by a competing search engine trying to attract traffic. It will be unseated because they forget that when you're the biggest
dog around, you make people nervous, and when you make people nervous, they might not want to play with you.
And here's your pseudo-Facebook poll of the day: What kind of dog do you see
Google as?