For the last year or so, my presentations have ended with a warning that Google’s glory days are over. The warning is based around 1) Google’s almost total reliance on sponsored search for its profits and 2) how the ‘Closed garden’ approach of both Facebook and (Apple) Apps, circumvent the opportunity to use Google search. Indeed my ‘MyTop’ slide shows an ‘enhanced Facebook’ with its prominent Bing-powered search box. Ie Facebook users, if and when they wish to search, do it within the ‘Closed Garden’.
I repeated this speech yesterday to the senior execs from one of our customers and got the usual looks of incongruity.
But, as we saw from the change in control last week, Google are increasingly concerned about this very thing. Made even more problematic as Google have no social networking play and have failed in every attempt to go down that road.
On top of that, the latest results from Experian’s Hitwise show the use of Google search dipping month after month. In the US, use was down another 3% in March 11 with market share under 65% for the first time ever. Google’s share was c80% just a year back. Microsoft’s Bing-powered search, however, was up 5% in March and now accounts for 30% of the market. Remember that currently the only search engine within the Facebook closed garden is Bing.