Google and Competitors - Essay Example

Working with a mission 'to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful', the expert team of Google community diligently maintains an index of websites and other content, which can be searched by anyone having an internet connection. Though Google is known mainly for it search engine, but there are a number of other services like Google mail, Google Earth, Google News, Google Finance etc. being offered to the net-community. The concept came up in the mid-nineties when Stanford university graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page stuck upon the idea of providing a search engine which could return relevant information without wasting much time.

Though there are a number of players in the fray giving competition to Google, but the key competitors of Google include Yahoo and MSN. Yahoo is mainly devoted on the search engines besides having the stake in other services as well. But for MSN, the primary focus area is the software development and of course. But the difference in the strength and popularity of Google and its nearest rival Yahoo can be gauged from the fact that during the fiscal year ended December 2006, while Google recorded revenues of $10,604.

9 million, Yahoo could mop up about $6,425.7 million. Goog (Datamonitor, 2008a). Google is considered a leader in search engine technology offering search results in 158 domains and more than 100 languages (Datamonitor, 2007). The strength lies in its innovative format and the speed with which it comes out with relevant topics. As per the figures given out by Datamonitor (2007), in March 2007, Google sites captured 48.3% of the US search market, while the corresponding figures for Yahoo stand at 27.5%. Some of the key strong areas of Google include;Strong Market position: Google far outnumbers its rivals as far as popularity of its search engine is concerned.

Well established brand identity: Brand identity forms a key strength in today's context, where visibility in media and easy identification features help in propagating the business prospects of the company. It is indeed quite surprising that Google, basically a service providing company, has even overtaken many well established product identity companies like, Microsoft, GE, Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart, IBM etc. According to Miillward Brown's 2007 ranking of brands2, Google is the topmost brand with a brand value of $m 66,434.

Google has worked on its brand quite consistently is apparent from the fact that the brand value has undergone a change of about 77% from the previous years. On the other hand Yahoo ranks a distant 42nd with a brand value of $m13,201, registering a decline of 6% in its brand value.According to market research firm Miillward Brown, Google is the world's top ranked brand, overtaking Microsoft and some other wellestablished brands like General Electric Company, Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart Stores and IBM.

Proprietary technology and technological infrastructures: The search engine technology of Google has indeed provided the company an edge over its rivals. Based on its proprietary PageRank technology, the search engine is having the largest searchable index amongst all (Datamonitor, 2007)AdWords and AdSense programs: Google works up its online advertising programs with the help of its unique concept of AdWords and AdSens