Google is so far ahead of its competitors that stories about whether anyone can unseat its top spot are beginning to look obsolete. Google controls roughly 51 percent of searches, which now include
both News Corp.'s MySpace and Time Warner's AOL. Still, competitors like Yahoo, MSN and IAC/InterActive's Ask.com are hoping to come up with something so new and essential that users will be forced to
change their search habits. They're hoping that Google continues to shift its focus from Web search to other Web-based applications and services. Doug Leeds, Ask.com's vice president of product
management, thinks that's a competitive advantage for his company. "Google's strategy has shifted from trying to get you to information on the Web to trying to capture more and more of your time. ...
We are focused solely on getting people to their information faster."
It's true, Google rolls out new, non-search-related products almost by the week. But the company is also growing at an
accelerated pace, so it insists that no fewer resources are being allocated to the company's core product than before. And what could be better than Google's Page Rank?
Ask.com adds related
topics to search queries. For example, a search for "John Lennon" also brings back links to "Yoko Ono." Clusty.com also brings back a list of topics related to every query. Eurekster believes in the
power of community search, in which friends' queries and results affect your results. All of these are interesting little differentiators, but don't forget that if any one of these technologies caught
fire, Google could easily swoop in and acquire it.
Read the whole story at BusinessWeek »