First Google sneaks up on Inktomi to win the Yahoo search engine account. Now, as the Web giant struggles with revenue and its executive team, could Google be sneaking up on Yahoo?
Google has become the search destination of choice for the technology-savvy and many others. The site also has earned the plaudits of search mavens, partly for its single-minded focus on search technology and its abstinence from the kind of information, communication and commercial extras that characterise Yahoo and other portals.
"Like some type of search engine Switzerland, Google never allied with the portal model but instead concentrated on offering good search right from the beginning," Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineWatch.com, wrote earlier this month.
But Google's neutral, search-only reputation seems increasingly at odds with reality as the site quietly introduces features that Web surfers ordinarily rely on portals to provide. These include white pages phone and address look-ups, mapping, Web site translation services and newsgroup access. The site has long offered Web directory listings, another portal standby.
The company's growth underscores its strength as a business-to-business play at a time when advertising revenues are slackening for consumer-focused Internet companies such as Yahoo, which has twice lowered its financial projections for the first quarter of 2000.
Google vehemently disputes that it has designs on its portal customers' turf. Thus far, its reputation as a search specialist with no wider ambitions has helped it maintain good relations with the portals, who provide its primary revenue. About 130 sites license Google's search engine, including Yahoo and Netcenter, a property of AOL Time Warner.
"The fact is that we have 130 customers that we power search for," said Omid Kordestani, Google's vice president of business development and sales. "They don't feel we're competing with them, and we're comfortable with that model. I use my favorite portals for sending emails, instant messaging, tracking stock portfolios - all these things Google isn't doing."
In a classic case of word-of-mouth marketing however, Google's site has quietly become a draw for Web surfers, offering an uncluttered place to find information. The company processes 70 million search queries daily - half through its own Web site, the rest through portal partners that license its engine.
Google says it has 10 million unique visitors per month. It also achieved undisputed prominence when it swiped the Yahoo search engine account from standard-bearer Inktomi.
But as Google keeps adding to its roster of available services, it will likely continue pulling traffic from established portals, analysts said.
"I don't think its goal is to become a destination site," said The Yankee Group analyst Rob Lancaster. "That's not a dead market, but it's not the best place to be right now...(Still) they are potentially stealing business from their customers, and they need to be careful which direction they are pointing toward."
