Google is a Market Leader. Is anyone keeping up or even following?

Google is a Market Leader – Is anyone keeping up or even following?

BY Melt du Plooy

Sep
25
Category: Industry news, Search Marketing

Generally speaking, our World is changing and it is hard for most of us to keep up with new developments, specifically when it comes to technology. In the World of Search, it is much the same and you have to keep on re-inventing yourself. If you don’t, you are constantly lagging behind and you have to work much harder to gain back some ground. Well, this is true, even for the leader in Search.

It is true that Google is the leader in Search, holding around 65 percent share of the search market in the US while Bing is gaining some market share and Yahoo is falling behind (based on latest Comscore Search Analysis). It is therefore interesting to see what these Giants are doing to keep the momentum going. Let’s have a quick look at some of the latest news to see what is stirring and causing ripples throughout the online community and compare the frequency of these events between the Search Giants.

I am going to simply cover the latest new launches, trends or news surrounding Yahoo, Bing and Google for the last 30 days or so, starting with Yahoo first.

Yahoo! Launches (2)

Yahoo! Updates (7)

Bing Launches (1)

Bing Launches Visual Search | Bing Launches Visual Filtered Search

Bing Updates (2)

Bing Market Share increases (Microsoft increases search share; More Bing—Microsoft’s search engine is posting strong numbers; Microsoft Gains In Search As Google, Yahoo Decline)
Microsoft Releases Bing iPhone and Mac SDK on CodePlex

Google Launches (5)

Google Updates (20)

That should be enough for now. I have to mention that these references are from recent results I found for the last 30 days. I did not look at the global picture of each company nor individual specific services or products, nor updates or trends related to specific countries or regions as that would have taken a while, but I think it is clear by just looking at the difference in number of references from the snapshot above that Google is by far leading the pack.

So what makes Google a Market Leader?
A Market Leader is defined as follow:

It is a Brand, product, or firm that has the largest percentage of total sales revenue (the market share) of a market. A market leader often dominates its competitors in customer loyalty, distribution coverage, image, perceived value, price, profit, and promotional spending.

That would certainly be true of Google as they are being more proactive than any of the other two major players. They have established their brand as being loyal to it’s users, with value for money, while the company’s scale simply allows it to produce products that are better than it’s competitors (at least for most). They continue to work on growing their service offerings, expanding into new spheres other than online (desktop applications, etc.), whilst adding compatible location based services in many countries.

In a article way back in August 2008, Google, then, was the search leader in customer satisfaction, and one year later, they are still leading the way.

No wonder they can be considered Market Leaders. Perhaps Google is just bent on being the best. Well, if you were Google, you’d probably say, “What the Heck, why not?”. And why wouldn’t you say that?