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It is safe to say that Google's greatest advantage right now is not its technology but the explosive brand name it owns. Internet brands have a volatile nature, with many of them becoming extinct after a couple of years after failing to meet expectations (AOL is a prime example of a multimedia company gone (almost bust) losing out to DSL, Cable, and the host of Internet options available.) Right when Google is starting to slow down and appear to become susceptible to a sound beating by other brands, they turn an about face and use their search as a profitable means.
The biggest competitor Google might be facing today is Microsoft. They've come up with their own version of "web crawler", which was noticed online last April. MSN decided to dive headfirst into the search business a while ago but has been hesitant to throw their MSN Search feature up-a-notch into the spotlight. Their managers claim that their engineers find the search engine computer algorithms as extremely hard to conquer. Don't count Microsoft out though - they have been entering profitable markets for quite some time now. Microsoft have beaten the likes of Netscape, Apple, and IBM. A Microsoft equipped with a powerful search engine on MSN and Longhorn, their new operating system - will send a shockwave through the industry and force competitors to take a step back.
An interesting titbit is that Google has competitors that aren't even search engines. One of Google's most vicious competitors is Amazon.com, the world's largest online bookstore. In October, Amazon came up with a service called Search Inside the Book which let customers sift through a couple of their books pages before purchasing. To complete this project, Amazon had to scan every page of more than 120,000 books into a huge database, which lets customers read the first few pages contents to get a gist of the book. This is an entirely new kind of information gathering over the Internet, comparable to an encyclopaedia form that is unmatches. Joel Mokyl, a professor at North-western University of economics, said people could be in remote places of the world and still have access to this load of information! What a democracy, to say the least.
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