Search Engine Competition

I never gave the search engine industry much thought before reading this week’s assignments and I always used Google to find whatever it is I needed to know.  While preparing to write my post on the discussion board I stumbled across an article written by Hal Singer of Forbes that analyzes the online search “market” that Google is being accused of monopolizing.  I expected to read that Google’s main competitors were Yahoo, Bing, and AOL.  What I found out was that the greatest competition Google faces comes from Facebook, Amazon, and Apple.  Facebook has the ability to create queries that mine through an enormous amount of data that is posted on the social media giant’s pages.  The survey also found out that one third of all people who search for a product pull up Amazon’s page first.  Another avenue that consumes use to find information is to download a specific application directly to a smartphone to use a reference for research.  For example, I downloaded a fitness application that allows me to quickly find calories of anything with a barcode.  I use this app I found through Apple’s Store because it is quicker to find and more reliable than what I may get when using Google.  The article was written during the time Google was first being analyzed to determine if it violated anti-trust laws.  The research ended up proving that Google was not a monopoly, it also proved that it didn't have the stranglehold on the search industry as we all once thought.