Could Google be on the decline soon?

I know, it sounds crazy. But think about it, they've kind of failed miserably at the social networking thing with Google +, are losing quite a bit of ground to social media in terms of where people are finding information and spending time online and generally seem to be desperate to find anything else to succeed at before Search and Gmail lose steam.

And hey, the whole privacy and NSA collusion thing probably hasn't helped public perception of the company either.

So do you think Google could sometime in the foreseeable (albeit not near) future end up as the next Yahoo or Microsoft?

 

Most definitely. The only constant in life is change. Some new company will come up with an awesome way to index and search the web to supplant Google. 10 years from now it's very likely we'll think of Google how we think of Yahoo, a shell of its' former self.

 

Think people generally get sick of the way google tries to tie you in to all their services. It wasn't so bad before when you could join one and have no use for the others. But now they try and make it so you can't do that, which puts you off wanting to use any then.

Never been a big Google service user anyway, I use hotmail not Gmail and only ever used AdSense they offer. But it was on a news site, or MS was punting it to get more Hotmail/MSN users from Google. That google reads all your Gmail content to target ads at you. They basically read your emails.... which Hotmail say they never do.

 

I think Bing will be a real contender for the top spot.

 

God I hope so.
I can not stand Google at all.

From forcing youtube users who ONLY want youtube to utilize google+ and their policies regarding google services on Windows and Windows phone platforms, I would love to see a slight decline, only because they have WAY TOO MUCH POWER with little competition(or none basically) in most of their product markets.

 

the other problem that I don't see discussed much is mobile. From what I have seen and my own personal experience, people surf less when they are using mobile. They search less, visit less sites when they do search, and explore sites they visit less. I have seen a drop in pageviews from users who access via mobile.

 

With their recent purchase of Nest, they are positioning themselves to be a dominating force in home automation tightly integrated with their search/ad products and their massive ability to track. This is big, mark my words. Google is way too smart and wealthy to just "go away" or even decline, imho. On the contrary, I predict they will only continue to become more influential and powerful.

 

Yeah, it's rather scary, actually.

 

Baidu is one to watch:

China has the population and if Baidu is backed by the government they have the potential to become the largest. As we operate on AFI in Chinese as well, we see a lot of searching by Baidu. And an increase in searches by it in other languages as well.

 

BaiduSpider, gets banned by a lot of site owners. It much like Yahoo Slurp!, in that it can invade your site in very large numbers frequently and don't think it obeys robots.txt crawl delay rules either like Slurp!, Google and MSN will. It can eat your bandwidth and slow your site down, so it has a bad rep that bot.

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2067357/Bye-bye-Crawler-Blocking-the-Parasites

And unless your forum is demographic aimed at Chinese people. It serves no real purpose on your board.

 

Thanks for the information.

We are an international website and yes the Chinese speaking section is aimed at the Chinese speaking population. As there are gangs of spammer also operating on Chinese soil. Not very smart of them but....

 

I'll have to agree with you. They're just too invested with their products.

 

I've been able to find stuff in bing that wouldnt come up in a google search. Apple is working on their own public search engine