Why Google Isn’t Ebay

My thoughts on Google’s monopoly in Internet search. It’s not hard to imagine Goolge being knocked off the top of the search engine hill. Any one of three events happening will seriously damage their position. All three happening and they’re no longer serving the majority of search results.

1. Yahoo dumps Google
2. AOL gets their own good search engine
3. Microsoft gets a serious search engine

The weakness in Google’s position is that people can change where they search in a heartbeat. In fact, people can change where they search without even knowing it, for example when Yahoo changes from Google, Google loses a very large chunk of it’s traffic without people making any change in how they serf the web.
Individuals have no vested interest in using Google for seaching the web. If you get bad results there, you just go somewhere else. If you continue to get bad results at Google, why would you keep going back? Even if Google keeps the quality up, why would anyone rely only on Google when competitors who are as good or better show up. You can easily search the competing sites too, for a variety of results, instead of digging deep into Google to get what you want.
Don’t mistakenly see Google’s position as being strong. Make a comparison with another internet company that has a monopoly, Ebay. Ebay’s position is very strong, because there you find the traffic of buyers and sellers. The sellers don’t want to leave because that’s where the buyers are. The buyers don’t want to leave because that’s where the sellers are. With Google, searchers don’t want to leave because they get the best results there. Google’s monopoly is much more fragile, because they’re much more dependant on not having a viable competitor. It’s much easier for their customers to make the change individually than it is for Ebay’s customers to make a change. In order for Ebay’s customers to change, they’d have to do it all en mass, all to the same place that provides an equal or better service. Google’s customers can leave one at a time.