Latest on Google
.............Research firms are only now beginning to take the measure of the company's influence. A recent study by Outsell showed that 80 percent of advertisers now use the Internet, with the adoption rate projected to hit 90 percent by 2008. While search engine advertising is expected to increase 26 percent this year, with Google raking in the largest share, spending is projected to grow 2 percent for newspaper and magazine ads and 2.4 percent for radio and television ads.
Similarly, the Google effect has reduced Internet service companies -- who'd once hoped to be gateways to the Internet that profited from Internet services -- to ``pipe companies" that build networks and charge businesses and consumers for access.
And, Google's e-mail, calendar, and word-processing products are pioneering an ad-supported Internet delivery model that threatens the desktop licensing model of Microsoft and other proprietary software companies, and could appeal to their ``enterprise" market of businesses and other organizations. Aiding Google's efforts to deliver robust software on the Internet, and faster search results, is a worldwide network of between 300,000 and 1 million servers, according to analysts' estimates; Google itself declines to specify its number of servers.
Microsoft and Yahoo Inc. are working to counter Google, with Yahoo concentrating more on original content and Microsoft developing its own search capabilities and ad-supported Internet software. But the biggest threat to Google could be the proliferation of local and smaller vertical search engines -- in fields like travel, finance, and retail -- that could offer even more targeted advertising. Many newspapers, among others, are developing local search technology.
``If you want to attack Google, you're more likely to succeed by peeling off searches that are vertically oriented," said Fredrick Marckini , chief executive of search engine marketing firm iProspect of Watertown, a division of London-based Aegis Isobar Worldwide.
Marckini said Google is fighting back by deputizing ``contributors," specialists who can provide niche-oriented searches, and by offering advertisers more information on what people search for.
Google's newest product offerings could be especially attractive to advertisers, said Sapna Satagopan , search analyst for JupiterKagan Inc., a San Francisco research firm. ``Every one of these new releases seems to be going in that direction of creating small groups of consumers so they can offer them to advertisers," Satagopan said.
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