I like to indulge myself a little on a Friday morning, and look for emerging trends across all of our client accounts. I did say a little.
When looking at which search engines send traffic to our clients, like Olympic events, the three medal winners stand on a podium. Unlike the Olympic podiums, the Gold medal winner stands several kilometres higher than the Silver medal winner, while the Bronze athlete is barely off the ground.
What I find particularly strange is that this has changed very little over the last five years or so. While we’ve seen Windows Live slide into third place, many websites find the traffic to be incredibly poorly targeted. So in terms of quality, Google are in first place, Yahoo in second place and in third place… Ask? AOL?
As in many things technology related, it’s effectively a two-horse race:
And even though Yahoo are trailing far behind Google in pretty much any metric you care to choose, they are still in second place. And in a world where so many people are getting annoyed with Google, one of the Yahoo’s greatest strengths, perversely, may simply be not being Google. For now at least.
If we were to draw up a pie chart of all the search engines with an approximation of their market share, we’d see Google dominating the vast majority of the market, Yahoo taking a very small piece of the pie, and all the others barely registering as crumbs.
And while markets changes with time, realistically, the likes of AltaVista, AllTheWeb and Go.com aren’t competing with Yahoo and Google, they’re competing with each other. The only engine competing with Google is Yahoo.
Most, if not all, technology markets show similar patterns, and the software market is no exception to the rule.
Whether it’s email clients, image editors, database software, financial management, Twitter clients, newsreaders, security suites and so on, there is always the dominant leader, the #2 choice, and then all the others.
If you’re one of the others, or one of the crumbs in the pie, you can’t possibly hope to compete with the #1 slot. Yet if your product and marketing are good enough, you do have a chance of climbing above the other crumbs, and giving #2 something to worry about. And if you can eventually take over his position, then (and only then) are you in a position to start posing a threat to the person on the top.
