Microsoft Hopes to Crush Google - Google is Not Sweating It
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Even with these new MSN Search features invading Google’s territory, Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, isn’t breaking a sweat. Since Microsoft is a complete newcomer to search, he expects it will be years before Microsoft could reach the point that Google has on the web. He later said, "It looks to me like this space is so large that there will be multiple winners." He said that Google’s true competitor is Yahoo. This seems a much more reasonable pair, since Yahoo is another established search giant who’s product offering doesn’t vary much from Google’s.
This doesn’t stop Google from offering competition for Microsoft. Just as Microsoft is stampeding into search, Google has already started creeping onto the desktop. Last year, Google offered a desktop search that integrated onto a user’s taskbar or desktop. Months later, Yahoo, Apple, and Microsoft all released their own desktop searches. Now the competition in these products seems largely based on how many file formats can be supported and how well the search can be integrated to the operating system.
Google’s expansion has been based on some fair innovation followed by a lot of repackaging. The Google search has seen many incarnations, from an online shopping tool to a local map hunter. Recently, though, they have been branching into less familiar territory. One such area is Gmail, web based email with deep search integration. This service has come into stiff competition with Microsoft’s Hotmail and Yahoo mail. With far less annoying advertising and a cleaner site, Gmail is giving competitors a real challenge even though it’s still in beta.
If you check out Google Labs and some other new things in Google’s stash, you’ll see their ambitions. For one thing, that Google login that users enter into Gmail will soon be useful for a lot more. They are linking personalized services together using that login. The company is designing a personal home page system (much like My Yahoo) that allows logged-in users to see what they want on Google’s homepage, including news headlines and subjects of emails sitting in their Gmail accounts.
Also, Google is releasing a Search History feature that uses that login. While logged in, the search engine logs what searches you made and what results you checked out. Is it obvious where this is going? Just as web based email like Gmail make Outlook and other email checking programs unnecessary, this online history replaces the history feature in web browsers. However, unlike the records that Internet Explorer and Firefox keep, Google’s feature takes this one step further than its counterparts can. It helps to customize search results for participating users and brings them the results that it determines to be the best for that person’s surfing habbits.
As Google adopts more features like this, it brings more of a user’s focus to itself and away from traditional software. This allows Google to customize the internet experience for users, and it simultaneously makes local software less vital.
More and more ordinary applications are being moved to the internet, some that people already take for granted. An amazing amount of research is done online, circumventing libraries. Journaling has moved from diaries and word processors to internet blogs. Google is helping to fuel this trend, and it is also thriving from it. As more of users’ time is spent online and working through Google and other web portals, users spend less attention on what other software they may be using.
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