Alan’s Angle – Should Google Feel Threatened?

By Alan Johnson

First of all, I’d like to take advantage of this opportunity and thank all of you for looking into the first guest post of my “Alan’s Angle” series, which will have covering the week’s industry-related highlights as the main focus, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo! will be in the spotlight today.

As usual, when an event of this magnitude occurs, it’s easy to get carried away. Sure, the thought of two important companies teaming up in order to put an end to Google’s reign, in order to make the Web a better place for advertisers, publishers as well as regular users is more than interesting, but aren’t we being just a little bit too optimistic?

One figure comes as an inevitable reality check in this situation: 65%. Yes, Google’s market share makes it easy to understand that threatening their market position will not exactly be an easy task. Not only that, but it’s also fairly clear that things will not be happening overnight if at all.

Even with Google’s fair share of controversial decisions, even with their recent attitude, they are by far the biggest player in this industry and under these circumstances even threatening their market position seems like an almost impossible task at this point.

Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo! Shouldn’t necessarily be seen as the solution which will somehow save us from Google’s domination, but rather as something which could add a little spice to the search engine equation. Do we even need to be protected from Google? And would Microsoft, out of all companies, actually be the perfect solution we have been waiting for? Of course not, as I am convinced that any person with a little common sense will agree.

While Google isn’t exactly what one would call perfect, Microsoft has its share of controversial practices as well. And under such circumstances, does it really matter who wins? Of course not, the only thing which matters is the fact that healthy competition is always beneficial as far as users are concerned.

Google or Microsoft, having just one big player with an overwhelming market share is simply not healthy. As a person who uses both search engines and as a person using both AdWords and AdCenter, I could really care less who ends up winning. The only thing I personally care about is seeing the products improve as a result of some healthy competition.

Should Google feel threatened? I don’t know about you, but I’d sure like to see that and I would most definitely like to see them act accordingly for a change.

About Alan Johnson

This is a guest post by Alan Johnson, who is holding a contest with prizes worth over $1000 over at TheRatingBlog.com.