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by crockstar 4729 days ago
Hi Chuck,

I'm glad that folks like Blekko are trying to improve the search landscape but do you have any figures to back up the declining revenue per click?

I feel as though Google are becoming more and more focussed on profits (evidenced by their (not provided) data hypocrisy, role out of "enhanced campaigns, etc.) but their profits seem to grow[1] and they seem to focus on margins over advertiser or user experience with increasing focus.

I'm glad that folks like yourselves are in the market as I say but until someone develops better algos and better results (for the majority of queries) it's unlikely that folks will get angry enough to move or see a viable alternative.

In spite of these changes I haven't really seen a decline in Google's market share[2] drop consistently or significantly so I don't really see a change coming any time soon.

References: [1] http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2013/01/1-22-2...

[2] http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2275863/Google-Bing-Bot... (June, '13) "Google has the identical search share of 66.7 percent when comparing May 2012 and May 2013."

vs.

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2269591/Googles-Search-... (May, '13)
1 comments
ChuckMcM 4728 days ago
Read Google's financial releases if you want to see evidence of their declining revenue per click, of follow the news [1][2][3]. Its a combination of factors, the market is maturing, there aren't too many people left who don't advertise on the Internet, and other sources are getting more market share (Bing, Facebook, Etc.)

  > I'm glad that folks like yourselves are in the 
  > market as I say but until someone develops better
  > algos and better results (for the majority of 
  > queries) it's unlikely that folks will get 
  > angry enough to move or see a viable alternative.
Actually one of the things Blekko has taught me is that search market share is no longer about search quality. At Blekko we demonstrated that we could provide better results in important queries and that how we did that would scale as we got larger. But we didn't get a lot of traction. Microsoft however (who we talked to) were so impressed that they essentially ripped off everything we were doing and put Bing on that path.

Now on the one hand I should be outraged Microsoft ripped us off [4], but I'm not. Its been interesting to see how much time and money they have spent making our strategy into a 'full size' search engine, and realizing that we were not going to be able to raise close to a billion dollars (which is what they will have easily spent by now) to take it to market against Google. The Bing challenge, the editors picks, the whole thing taken right from our playbook. And while I believe they are having the best success they ever have against Google to date (its a good strategy), there is another 3 years for it to run before consumers think that they are equal services. And there is a whole lot of dirty politics between here and there.

As for market share, its a curious thing. You can earn it or you can force it. Look for more and more "search defense" going on, for example non-Google searches getting harder on Android, or in Chrome. Conversely non-Microsoft searches in Windows products. With people like Firefox getting played in the middle (try to search on Google on Firefox on the standard Linux Mint distribution for example :-) Gone are the days where simply having a better product will let you win that prize. Way too much money involved.

[1] http://www.marketplace.org/topics/tech/weak-ad-revenue-pulls...

[2] http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/07/24/1553214/the-decline-...

[3] http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2013/04/18/google-tops...

[4] It would have been polite of them to have at least offered to buy us out :-)

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