Barron’s Notices Google Growth

It is the US Thanksgiving today so there is a serious lack of action or attention happening in and around the North American tech industry. Perhaps that lack of attention explains why this short item appeared in yesterday’s Barron’s Blog.
Google: The Evidence Mounts; They’re Taking Share

The piece outlines how Google holds almost 59% of the search market share in the United States and nearly 70% of searches globally using comScore and Hitwise data reported here and in other search blogs earlier.

To me, the brief piece points out and reinforces how far behind the curve the mainsteam media and investment communities are in understanding the true scope of Google’s dominance in search. Since 2003, Google has served a minimum of 45% of all search results, peaking at nearly 85% in 2004 and 2005 when it directly produced Yahoo! results and indirectly produced MSN results.

Google’s dominance has had an enormous effect on how the Web has evolved with results that could be characterized as both good and evil. Its existence helped pull the North American tech world out of the dot-com bust of 2000 and its innovation has propelled the tech world further than any company before it with the possible exceptions of Microsoft and Sun. For SEOs and SEMs, Google is far and away the most important venue and is the one first thought of when contemplating a search marketing campaign.

Websites are either designed or rebuilt to specifically meet Google’s criteria for inclusion. Its major revenue source, AdWords, revitalized, refined, and now virtually defines the rules of the online advertising market. Its stocks have been predicted to peak above $900/share sometime next year. It is safe to say that Google has produced the world’s largest open grassroots wealth redistribution program through its organic and paid search marketplaces.

In some cases, Google’s growth threatens the stability of vast sections of the traditional and online economies. Recent ventures into display advertising and server-side software have worried critics and competitors who see room for Google to grow monopolistically larger. By producing the most efficient and relatively inexpensive targeted advertising programs in human history, Google is taking an increasingly large slice of online ad-spend.

Google has even greater growth plans in the near future. A recent transfer of several domain names with G-service potential was noted by Gary Price from Resource Shelf. Domain names such as GTAXES.COM, GMEET.COM, GOOGLESMS.INFO and GBRIEFCASE.ORG have business watchers speculating about services Google might introduce such as a Google tax service, a Google social B2B space or further Google  cell phone services. (We already know Google is getting into the mobile device biz with the introduction of Andriod)

It’s nice to see the mainstream and financial press taking an interest in the serious size of Google’s market share in search. I’m curious what took them so long to notice.