Google Further Improves Search, Does The Competition Have Any Chances?

We can think everything we want about Google and we can be paranoid all we want about how it collects all the information about every single user it has, but there’s no denying to at least one fact: Google Search is still their best product.

True, in the recent years Google has offered us numerous other applications, like Reader, Docs, Maps, and many others, and some of them are pretty good. But the problem with these products is that they are not necessarily best in class and if you are willing to dig deep enough, you will easily find alternatives for many Google products that will sometimes be better for your particular needs.

But the thing is that many of us are just too lazy to explore other products so we stick to Google products simply because we don’t want to go looking for something better and because it is simpler to keep everything in one place under one account than try to keep in mind where exactly your online documents are and what RSS aggregator you use to read your favorite feeds.

But the thing that made us come to Google in the very beginning and stick to it through all these years has always been search: something that we know Google is great in. It is simple: we know that Google will provide the best results in the vast majority of cases so we come to the search engine again and again. And this habit of using Google has probably resulted in more or less significant adoption for its other products when competitors - even those that produce better applications - rarely have a chance to stand out from the crowd because people will always come to Google expecting only the best things from the powerful brand.

And while we may think that Google Search is the best thing that can happen to search (for now, at least), it is good to know that Google keeps innovating. So today at its Searchology event Google has proved once again that the company knows just about everything about search and how it should be done to be good and better than it now is.

2 years ago at the previous Searchology event Google introduced its universal search - what is now the standard view for Google search results where you happen to see everything in one place combined, including regular links, images, videos, and stories from Google News.

Since then the only significant thing introduced into Google Search was SearchWiki - the tool that lets you rearrange the results for a particular search queries and change how you will see the results when you do the same search next time. This functionality also lets you add comments to search results that will be publicly visible for everyone who wants to see them. SearchWiki has quite a number of disadvantages and the attempts to manipulate it began immediately after launch but I don’t think it has taken off enough to really matter for many users.

Today Google has introduced quite a number of new exciting and important things. The first one is Search Options: now in addition to the usual options like language or the number of results you want to get displayed you can also search what type of resources you are interested in (be it product reviews or discussion forums) and the time when the resources have been created for you to be able to see only the latest results if this is what you actually need.

From what I see on the Russian Google, I can make the conclusion that these advanced options are only available to English-language Google users while support for international users will probably only be added with time.

Another big thing introduced today is rich snippets that are intended for users to easier see what results are most relevant even without clicking through to the pages themselves. Basically in addition to simple text information extracted from the page you will now be able to see more things like reviews and ratings that Google is able to extract from the pages that appear in the search results. Initially such rich snippets will appear for product reviews and people search while other types of content will be indexed appropriately with time. Now obviously Google asks for web publishers to cooperate and adopt microformats that will help Google extract the information needed for such rich snippets. And I can imagine the web publishers will be perfectly eager to help as this will offer a huge advantage in terms of traffic if your results are better noticed.

Another novelty that is announced but not opened to users yet is Google Squared, something that is yet to be launched in Labs and for now is described as the tool to describe search results in a spreadsheet form instead of the traditional way we see the results now. This new approach is supposed to make the results more structured than we now get using the traditional keyword search where in many cases you can easily get lost in the multitude of results.

So my impression is that Google has really improved its search functionality even when many of internet users were pretty happy with what we had before. Now it is even better and who will object having something that is better than what you already think of as a good enough thing.

But my question is what will happen to other search engines (the big players and small startups alike) that still want to compete with Google. The problem is while companies like Microsoft or Yahoo want to innovate and invest their money and efforts in search technologies promising that their technologies will soon be as good as those of Google, Google takes further steps ahead and leaves the competition even further behind. The same is more than true for small startups that try to figure out what is wrong with Google Search and come up with new ideas that they begin working on - only to face the fact that Google probably knows as well what is wrong and is already working to fix it. Now this is the hard question: what exactly should make a company want to compete with Google?