Threats to Google’s Supremacy

Rand Fishkin recently posted on the seomoz blog about the biggest threats to Google’s market share. Although his post was titled “The 4 Biggest Threats Google Faces”, he actually listed five threats (and numbered them 1 – 5).

Proficiently stating the obvious, Rand began by pointing out that Google is threatened by players already in the search engine market (Yahoo!, Microsoft, etc.). Continuing down the same track, he next observed that the threat to Google could come from outside the current search engine market. The first three paragraphs of his post were spent establishing that the threat to Google’s supremacy could come from… anyone.

Of the four scenarios presented by Rand that could threaten Google, number five was the most interesting. Could Google ever be overwhelmed by spam to the point that users would find its content irrelevant? SEOs everywhere outsmart Google every day, but there is more than a tinge of arrogance in believing that they will ever get so far ahead of Google engineers that the situation will be unrepairable. In fact, most SEOs would admit that they are always a step behind Google engineers, and that the only mode of survival is a balanced approach to search engine optimization for the benefit of useful, functional websites. SEOs are behind. Black hats become white hats every day.

So who could possibly threaten Google’s supremacy? Despite the general perception, Google is far from invincible. I believe the answer is “what”, not “who” will threaten Google. There are plenty of weaknesses that could be exploited by startups and potential competitors, a few of which are glaringly obvious. I’ll just look at one:

There is a ton of great content that Google cannot index. Google can’t index flash, javascript, or the content of videos. Google cannot even index the content of images except using alt tags and the surrounding text. Thousands of great websites are undervalued because Google cannot index this content. Google’s technology has a bigger impact on the webmaster toolkit than any other factor, because content is useless without visitors. We all know that Google has people working these problems, but imagine a search engine emerged that could index and describe these forms of content. Who wouldn’t use it? Video, flash, and javascript appeal more to the visual nature of our society, and the entire web would change if it were easier to find these sites. That seems the biggest and most obvious threat to Google’s supremacy.