Google Industry Profile

Industry Profile

By: Elliot Grossman

The industry that Google competes in is the search engine industry. Google’s main competitors in the search engine industry are: Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, Lycos, Microsoft, and MSN. Search engines are designed to search and organize information on the World Wide Web, automatically and algorithmically. Therefore the key to success in the search engine industry is providing its customers with an easy, simple, and efficient way to organize the information on World Wide Web, and to best match customers’ inquiries. Keynote.com released an abstract analysis of the search engine industry. Keynote’s Customer Experience Index, ranked Google the best. Keynotes’ Customer Satisfaction Index also ranked Google as the primary search engine and assessed that 89 percent of customers had a positive experience with their website, over 30 percent more satisfaction than the second leading search engine in customer satisfaction, Yahoo! (Search Engine Industry Abstract 2).

So what make’s Google so elite? What makes their customer satisfaction higher than any other search engine company; what value is Google providing its customers that other search engines are not providing? It’s a perfect storm of many complementary components. Their most notable differentiation is the way they organize and rank search results. Google’s search engine’s complexity and uniqueness makes other search engine companies inferior and creates barriers of entry into the search engine industry because of the difficulty in creating a search engine as efficient or popular.

The Google advertisement strategy is very unique and has had exceptionally positive results. Keynote.com’s “Ad Activity Index” ranked Google the least ad-active website of the major search engine websites: Microsoft, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, MSN, and Lycos (Search Engine Industry Abstract 2). Yet they have the greatest advertisement revenues in the search engine industry because of their approach and method. Brin and Page originally were in opposition of advertisement-funded search engine. So when Brin and Page lessened on their previous stance, they compromised with the intention of not overwhelming their customers with advertisements or pop-ups, like Ask Jeeves or Lycos. Google realized pop-ups and massive advertisements deter customers away from their website, so they took the approach of minimizing advertisements. They took the approach of matching advertisements with search results, to minimize deterring customers away from their website with annoying and irrelevant information. Google began selling advertisements associated with the search of keywords. This allowed for huge revenues with minimal advertisement, while maintaining customer and supplier satisfaction, and efficiency;