January 2015

For Google the Bell Tolls

Has the search giant’s dominance come to an end?

Towards the end of the year, while we were all busy enjoying the holidays, a potentially transformative agreement was penned between two Internet stalwarts. With the stroke of a pen, Yahoo became the default search engine for the Firefox browser. The implications of this deal have already become apparent, with Yahoo’s share of Firefox search results jumping from 9.6 percent to 29.4 percent almost overnight. Perhaps equally important, Google’s share has dropped 20 percentage points, to around 63 percent.

Ceatus clients have an advantage in this new environment, because Ceatus has always been focused on generating significant traffic for its clients from ALL of the search engines, including Yahoo. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Search Advertising: A Blessing or a Curse?

Google is still generating $3 billion per quarter — that’s not a typo — and it still dominates the search market. The search giant owns the top smartphone platform in Android, as well as the top video site, YouTube. But deals like the one cut between Firefox and Yahoo could be a harbinger of things to come,
and could portend a steady decline in Google’s overall dominance.

First and foremost, though it rakes in gobs of money from search advertising, Google is far too dependent on this revenue stream. The vast majority of Google’s overall revenue comes from search ads. This becomes a massive problem if competitors begin to chip away at its search dominance — as has occurred with deals such as the one recently signed by Yahoo and Firefox.

Death by a Thousand Cuts

And there is little reason to believe that it will end with Yahoo and Firefox. Apple could decide to bail on Google, and Facebook already has its own internal news feed search that has the potential to supplant many of Google’s search queries. In other countries, search engines such as Baidu (China) are making inroads. And Amazon is increasingly becoming the go-to engine for product searches. To add to Google’s woes, mobile users now spend upwards of 80 percent of their time using apps. This bodes well for companies like Yelp, but poorly for ones that depend on search, especially Google.

There are problems in other areas as well. Though Android is the dominant smartphone platform, not everyone is using it to Google’s advantage. Many companies have circumvented Google’s strategies in ways that negatively affect Google’s ad revenue. In the battle over cloud storage, Google ranks a lowly fourth place, after Amazon, Microsoft and IBM. What’s more, European legislators are making life extremely difficult for Google in ways that may discourage the search giant from pushing forward with ambitious innovations to its main product: its search engine.

Social media is also eating into Google’s dominance — and herein lie some important implications for surgeons, because with social media we’re talking about word of mouth; something that obviously affects surgical practices directly. As you know, people are much more likely to trust recommendations from friends and family (read: Facebook) than from some unknown surgeon’s website that comes up high in Google’s search results. Facebook has taken full advantage of this situation by building search mechanisms into its news feed. And Google’s attempt to fight back, in the form of Google+, has not been the success they hoped for.

What does all this mean for your practice? That, if you haven’t already, it’s time to diversify your online marketing strategy. Make sure your marketing company markets you to all the search engines; expand your brand through real citations (i.e. be other places on the Web besides your website); and last but not least, ensure that you have a social media presence.

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