“The greatest hoax ever played on the Internet is the idea that Google’s growth was somehow “natural” or “viral”, and that the strength of their search results alone is what propelled them to their insane 70% market share. I’ve even seen videos of Googlers listening to speakers come in and tell them this myth, and I’m sure many of today’s current employees think it’s the gospel. It isn’t… Google bought as much search space as they could from OEMs, portals, etc. Again, the reason that Mozilla.org is growing concern and Opera is now free? Because of the search deals they made with Google.
They’re doing it again in mobile, and no one seems to be noticing. The first thing I thought of when I read that Google is getting 50x more search traffic from the iPhone than any other phone is “Wow, that default iPhone search deal they made with Apple is really paying off.” Of course all the fanboys don’t bother noticing that and just assume somehow Google would be getting all that search traffic “naturally”. Google might still be seeing a huge percentage more iPhone traffic because of how nice the iPhone interface is than the rest (it is the best mobile browsing experience bar none) but that’s not the significant part. You don’t see Yahoo! or Microsoft or Ask making the same claims, do you? Google’s getting that huge increase in search traffic because they *paid* for it.”
5 months ago