Categories: Articles

Google Does It Again (And More)

Google continues to grow. For the month of December 2007, Hitwise ranks the percentages of all U.S. searches as follows:

1. Google – 65.98%.

2. Yahoo – 20.88%.

3. MSN – 7.04%.

4. Ask – 4.4%.

It seems a little easy to dismiss the others. It’s important to note that Google has only been in business since about 1998 (about ten years). There was life before Google, and there is always an opportunity for a new start-up to crash the landscape or for things to change within the existing space.

Just this week, it was announced that Microsoft had made a $1.23 billion dollar bid for another search engine, Fast.

From understanding the future power of Universal Search to simply acknowledging that more and more Consumers are having their first brand interactions at the search box, it’s easy to see why Marketers and Advertisers continue to shift budgets into search. 2008 already looks to be like the best year-to-date for Search Engine Marketing. The old advertising adage of "no one ever got fired for putting television on the media buy" is quickly shifting to, "no one ever got fired for putting search on the media buy."

But, in a world where 20% of all searches done on Google each month are keyphrases that have never been searched before, the challenge for Marketers is to figure out a way to deploy a mass amount of keywords that just "perform," while tweaking the batch that fluctuates all the while looking at that 20% to see what new words can be incorporated. So, as simple as that little search box looks, Search is increasingly becoming more complex and competitive.

You can see the Hitwise information here: Google Sets New High With 66% of US Searches in December.

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.