3.1.5 The search engines competition

Google has been created in 1998 and at that time search engines were already
in place, it did not scared Google and one after the other Google bypassed all of
them. In fact among the big four Yahoo is the oldest (1994) and Microsoft the
youngest (2003). Even if the battle seems to be finished it will take a lot of time to
Google to be the number one in all countries (everything being linked to culture
rather than rationality) which in fact is giving hope to its followers.
At the time I am writing this thesis discussions are still on the way between
Yahoo and Microsoft in order for Microsoft to buy Yahoo search technologies. We
can understand how strategic a such acquisition could be. Yahoo having the research
knowledge and Microsoft the funds as well as the software ownership.
Regarding Baidu we cannot clearly see how they could compete against
Google outside of China.
As I said previously specialized search engines are limited to the website they
are linked to.
We could then think about new comers who starting from nothing could beat
famous search engines in a small period of time, it could have been the success of
some products such as Cuil launched in summer 2008 which received a lot of
advertisement through the news17. But search engines is a very ungrateful world
where visitors are giving no more than one chance: the product works or it does not.

Illustration 7: Results page of Cuil

This is a point that I discovered very quickly and that you can test by
yourself. People want the information as soon as they can. They are
ready to test the product but in a certain amount of tries. When you
move from Google to another search engine you are often intransigent. At the first
result which does not fit your expectations you will go back to Google. But is the
search engine wrong or is it because it is responding differently that on what you
were used to?
In order to conclude this part I would say that with the search engine history
we have and the search engine market configuration, I cannot see how Google
could lose its position. Until now only one company succeeds to make a such gap in
the world of search engine and it is Google itself and it was in a period where
everything had to be created on Internet.
So I would say that on this field I don't see how Google can be beaten and
even worried.
A new technology regarding research is however more and more recurrent in
this field and is called semantic research.

3.1.6 The semantic web

“This part needs additional information and improvements and is then not finished
yet.”

The semantic web is another way of crawling the net. We all know how to
make a search on the Internet isn't it? We just type in some keywords and press the
return key in order to get the answer. In this configuration you have to feed the
search engine with the request.
With semantic Web the concept is a bit different and based on suggesting you
the request instead of typing it entirely. Each time that you are starting to type your
request a list of suggestions are coming to you. We are recently seeing more and
more this technology on the biggest search engines.
The purpose is in fact to guide you as best as they can in order to put you on
the right track and trying to avoid you to reach the labyrinth of the web.
This technology fits one of the main drawback of search engines and that I
call « search engine technology awareness » which consists in how to write good
requests for search engines.
The main drawback of the semantic web is that this is a very new technology
which then have a lot to do before reaching his maturity point. Here we are speaking
about a maximum length of a decade. We can also complain about the rigidity of the
system but it is true that with length and experience this issue could be fixed.
It said that Ask is one of the search engine which based a lot of R&D on this
new technology but according to me and without being a technician I think that
Google can have better results because of its huge database of requests. Future will
tell us what is going to happen.

3.2 Search engines dependency aspect

As I mentioned it in the introduction I define search engine dependency as the
fact that people are swearing only by one search engine when looking for
information on the Internet.

3.2.1 Search engines dependency proves

“This part needs additional information and improvements and is then not finished
yet.”

This is not the studies which are lacking on this topic. When looking for
information regarding information literacy on the Internet you arrive on different
sources of studies and this regarding all the countries of the world. Information
literacy is a relevant topic and an issue. I focused on some very recent and
francophone research that I found on the Internet regarding Canadian students18,
French19 and Belgium students20. I also found information regarding Germany on this
topic. Many sources are as well saying that such research have been made in mostly
all Europe, China (Hong Kong)21 and the United States22.
All the studies I found until now (all done on students panels so literate
people) are all saying the same thing: search engine are the first source of
information when looking on the Internet and all students seem to have receive not
enough training on how to look for information on the Internet.
The best study I found on this topic is one made on all the registered PhD
students (2,218 with an answer rate of 23,4%) last year (2008) on a whole region of
France (not a high technological developed country but far to be the least on a
worldwide scale)23.
As we can imagine PhD students have a high requirements regarding quality
of information.
The study shows that 67,5% of the respondents have never received a training
regarding how to look for information during their whole stay at the university which
could explain the fact that people are running toward search engines directly.
Search engines are used in 96% of the cases when performing research
(which emphasize the necessity of how to well use those technologies).
94% of them do not use blogs which I take as a good thing (even if the survey
is saying the opposite, blogs being written by professionals as well).
The most used search engines are Google (85%) and Google Scholar 37%
(which is a sub search engine of Google).
60% of them do not know what is a meta search engine and only 5% of them
use them.
46 % do not know the search engine of their field and only 20% do use them.
Those figures are very interesting because they show clearly how people are
not adapted to the technology they are using. PhD students should be some of the
most search engines awarded people and it seems that for France they are not. They
are strictly dependent of a single search engine which is here Google. They know
very few of his sub search engine and as written above they do not know how to use
the technology. They are also not aware massively about other search engines.

3.2.2 Search engines dependency aspect

Search engines dependency can however comes from different ways:
· Search engine satisfaction: you are using a specific search engine which
give you entire satisfaction, so why should you change?;
· Search engine patriotism: you are using this search engine in order to
support your local technologies;
· Search engine convenience: the search engine is providing you all kind of
services which made it very convenient to use or even made the other ones
not convenient to use;
Of course the trend for all search engine is to go for convenience because it
gives to customer everything they need. The main drawback is that for the search
engine companies you have then to dedicate less people to your core activity and
then there is a risk that your search activity will pay the price.
So being search engine dependent means using massively a search engine for
one of those reasons and ignoring all the other ones. Search engines dependency
reach very high rate in Europe:

Illustration 8: Search engines figures for

France, Source: XitiMonitor

Most of the European countries have like France a strong addiction to Google with
more than 90%. What does it concretely mean? Almost all European when making
search on the Internet are fed by using the same way to process information.

3.3 Search engines dependency problems

At the first sight when using a search engine we are not thinking about all the
issues which are coming out from them. We make our research and we get results
from this and then we try the results one after the other until finding the one which
fits the best our expectations.
The first main problem is that when addicted to a specific search engine
which normally gave you satisfaction the day when the result will not be the one you
want you may think about different possibilities:
· The information is not displayed so the information you are looking for does
not exist yet;
· The request was not good enough so let's try with other keywords;
The main issue to highlight is that people are so confident with some search
engines that they will not normally look for alternatives or even consider that their
favorite search engine can be wrong.
People are so confident with their search engine that they are not
thinking that the search engine can be wrong.

3.3.1 Privacy issues

I am a bit divided on this topic because I consider it as the mass public
« scarecrow » which is only good to animate polemical debates for nothing.
It finds its explanations in the way that search engines are collecting
information.
When analyzing search engines we have to consider that it is a free
product for all of us (in fact search engines get paid by displaying
advertisement on each web page). Each time you are making a
research on the Internet the search engine you are using registers the IP
number of your computer and of course the research you just made. All these data are
of course supposed to be confidential but some are used in order to make some
statistics such as how many Internet users from a specific country have visited this
website. It can be used for other purposes such as the rank of the most used research
and others data such as those. Of course the more information you give and the most
they collect so if you open an email account on a search engine for example they will
collect your name, address. Until now few are the cases where we got the proof that
information collected by search engines have been given to third parties. The most
famous one is the one of Yahoo in China which filtered some emails and gives the
names of some Chinese journalists who were denouncing things about the Chinese
government24.
To make it clear until now no mass exploitation of data have been observed
and the recent news given by major search engines (Microsoft and Google) are
saying that the trend is to eliminate those data as much as possible in the fear of
losing confidentiality25. We however have to consider an additional element the more
search engine know about what we are looking for and the most they can fit our
expectations, so I personally do not think that reducing the collection of data is in
people interest and I will qualify the privacy issue as a global scarecrow in order to
bug the major search engines and putting on the first row some alternative ones
which on the long run may will not fix those issues.