Internet search is a major part of the economy but the market is dominated by just one one company. Google could do with some competition

The figures for online trading speak for themselves. Sales and ad spend are rising, the rate at which they are increasing is going up and the end is not yet in sight. In some ways this is having liberating and democratising effect on the business landscape; small businesses can now challenge the high street on a level they could never do before. The super low start-up costs of setting up a website mean that is has never been easier to start selling. Your shop can be open 24-hours a day and you don’t even have to be awake while your sales are being made. However, there is one very big factor that is inadvertently causing trouble in paradise – Google.

The dominance of the world’s most popular search engine is so compelling that many users rarely use any other search engine. Google is simply better at getting the results we need and has a de facto monopoly on search. The company whose motto is ‘don’t be evil’ hasn’t done anything wrong and can hardly blame it for being good at creating such incredibly useful programmes. It is just that rather like Microsoft we have become so reliant on it that it is having an influence way beyond what we should hope any company to have. Fewer and fewer people are now ‘searching the internet’ instead they ‘Googling it’, such is the company’s dominance.    

Search is the main way we use the internet which means that for any business a good Google page rank is essential for successful internet trading. However, the difficulty of this is that when the search engine so much as tweaks its algorithms the entire western business community shakes. Recently, Google has done another one of its annual tweaks. Its timing isn’t wonderful as Christmas is a very important time for businesses. Firms with strong projections and sales expectations can all of a sudden find that their rank has been undermined. Google argues that the best way to get a good rank is to produce quality content. This may be true, but what ‘quality’ is defined by its secret and patented algorithms. 

Google is currently locked into a battle with Microsoft over the future of the internet. The battle is in itself interesting but what’s really should concern us is that there can be one company that can have so much influence over the future of the web.