Send In The ‘Clouds’
In less than a decade, search engine marketing has grown from a little understood and even derided concept (“who would ever want to pay to be in search results?”) into the single biggest sector in online advertising. With all that change and upheaval, it’s only natural for advertisers to start asking: What’s next for search?
In many ways, when you ask that question, you can’t help but focus on the industry’s largest player. With Google commanding 70 percent of the market, all eyes are on the biggest kid in class in order to figure out where we’re heading next. So what is Google doing?
The company continues to expand the list of services it offers to users at a torrid rate. In doing so, it’s started to resemble the portals that it displaced in the late ’90s. One of the reasons for Google’s early success had been its exclusive focus on search. And now it sells TV ads and offers word processing software? What’s the connection?
It turns out that change costs are not high in search—if I don’t get what I want on Google, then Microsoft or Yahoo are just a click away.
Thus far, Google has maintained its lead by providing a superior search experience. But the difference between its results and the competition’s is shrinking. At some point, either one of their current companies or someone around them is going to catch up. In order to keep up the growth rate and defend its turf, the company needs to find ways to grow its relationship with users beyond search, and lock them in.
Enter a broad range of tools that not only give users valuable and useful services—for free—but also provide Google with insight into user needs:
Personalized Search, Google Reader and iGoogle personalized homepages offer the company a view into a user’s individual content preferences.
Google Product Search and Checkout provide one-click checkout on thousands of retail sites, while giving Google access to detailed transactional information and crucial data about how search activity links to pur- chase behaviors.
Google’s Web-based applications, including Documents, Spreadsheets and Presentations, give the company a foothold into information that, until recently, was stored primarily on users’ desktops and potentially loosens Microsoft’s hold on consumers.
YouTube and Picasa allow users to store and share multimedia clips.
Google Maps and Earth allow users to navigate their world, in exchange for rich data about locations.
Google is also planning to launch a service called Google Health that will allow users to store and access their personal health records from any computer.
As users adopt more of these services, Google is building a large collection of the world’s data that some affectionately refer to as the Google Cloud. Once your data is in the “cloud,” that’s when things get interesting.
Despite its mammoth market share and broad range of services, less than 5 percent of Google’s users visit the search site today for anything other than search. It seems that users simply equate Google with search, and only search. So instead of bringing users to the cloud, Google is focused on bringing the cloud to users.
This philosophy is apparent in strategic moves such as Google’s recently announced alliance with Salesforce. Through this partnership, elements of the Google App suite—word processing, chat and e-mail—will be integrated directly into the Salesforce interface. This gives Google access to an audience of millions and puts its useful applications into action.
Additionally, Google has placed a lot of resources behind Google Gadgets—small, self-contained applications that can easily be syndicated to any blog or social network. These tools allow users to place doorways to any Google service or application in the places where they find them most useful.
Despite the impact of both of these tools, Google’s Android operating system for mobile phones may be the product that finally brings together the giant’s broad suite of services. All Android-enabled phones will undoubtedly have out-of-the-box integration with virtually every Google application. The value of having access to your entire “Google Cloud” in your pocket at any time may finally cause users to adopt these applications at a higher rate. After all, it’s not all that hard to imagine:
Accessing Google Health while sitting in a doctor’s office during your first visit and being able to pull up and easily share your medical records.
Taking and uploading mobile pictures directly to a Picasa account, posting mobile videos to YouTube or blogging directly to Blogger from your phone.
Once Android-enabled phones have conditioned users to view Google as the central point for storage and access to all their data, they are more likely to begin using more of the search giant’s services. That doesn’t mean that another engine couldn’t catch them—just that the stakes will have been raised once again.
