Should Google get scared?

Facebook's acquisition of FriendFeed may spell some trouble for the top search giant

What is common between drug dealers and people from the IT industry? Both refer to their clients as users.

What is the difference? Drug dealers have lesser difficulty in keeping their users hooked to what they peddle, while the IT industry has to struggle somewhat to ensure loyalty.

But even within the IT industry, this varies. Just as some banned substances are more addictive than others, some IT habits stay, while others can be replaced easily. For example, if you are used to a Mac, it is hard to use a PC; if you use one brand of mobile phones, then you may have trouble sending quick SMSes with another brand.



Search me

For a company like Google, which has multiple offerings like mail and search, this presents a problem in parts. If you have a Gmail account, chances are you will stick to it because a lot of your contacts have it. But when it comes to search, the moment somebody gets better than Google, you will switch, without any qualms whatsoever.

Google knows this, Microsoft knows this, Google knows that Microsoft knows, and Microsoft knows that Google knows that Microsoft knows this, and journalists know that Google knows that...ok, you get the drift. In fact, in June 2009, the New York Post carried an article titled 'FEAR GRIPS GOOGLE' (yeah, the heading was in all caps) which said that, according to sources, Brin had ordered a study of Bing.

'Sergey Brin is so rattled by the launch of Microsoft's rival search engine that he has assembled a team of top engineers to work on urgent upgrades to his Web service', said The Post.

Brin and bear it

Google's answer to Bingu2014though Google denies this and says that this has been planned for a whileu2014is called Google Caffeine (check it out at https://www2.sandbox.google.com/), which is described as a next-generation architecture for Google's web search. This service was launched on August 10, and on the next day, Facebook bought FriendFeed.

Coincidence? Probably. But this also means one more thingu2014if Google has not already done so, then it will have to improve its real-time search because this is said to be one of the strengths of FriendFeed.

Some of the top brass at FriendFeed who will hold key positions in Facebook are ex-Google employees who have been responsible for Google Maps and Gmail. They know how Google operates and so Google will have to constantly innovate to stay ahead of FriendFeed, which might become a bigger threat to Google than Bing.

QUICK TAKE
>>Facebook has acquired FriendFeed
>>This could compete with Google
>>Google will have to add real time search to Caffeine

Gaining ground
Bing has slowly been stealing market share from Google as these figures show: