A blog for Website Managers ...

When was the last time you “Yahooed” a restaurant? Howabout “Binging” someone to learn more about them? Maybe, never. Google’s search engine monopoly corners online advertising so that there is a lack of competition from other companies. Characterized by Google’s singular power to control where customers turn, their monopoly provides the ability to charge what they want, when they want to. The European Union agrees Google needs to stop hogging the market, and they issued a list of Google’s monopolistic practices following a two-year probe:

Google hogs specialized search – Google prominently displays links to its own specialized search services within its web search results and does not inform users of this favorable treatment.
Google hogs content usage – Google uses without consent content from competing specialized search services in its own offerings. Google thereby benefits from the investments of competitors, sometimes against their explicit will.
Google hogs with exclusivity agreements with publishers – Google requires web site owners to display no or only a limited amount of online search advertisements from Google’s competitors, which reduces the choice of online search advertisements they can offer to users of their web sites.
Google hogs by creating contractual restrictions on the portability of Google’s AdWords – Google contractually restricts the possibility to transfer online search advertising campaigns away

Bing accounts for 17.9 percent of search share in the US but they may be gaining ground on Google. Without irony, Microsoft’s CEO recently called on the US Government to break up Google’s monopoly on search engines. Nevermind their long battle with the federal government over their own past monopolies.

Governments won’t likely be successful in breaking up the mega-company that is Google, precisely because there is nobody doing as good as job. We Google because no service has proven better at search results. Nonetheless, calling a monopoly out doesn’t meant it should be broken up. In fact, the break up will occur through the natural shift in user preferences and methods for accessing search results. There will be new entrants coming into the market attempting to disrupt Google’s corner on advertising and searching. The introduction of mobile technology and new gaming systems, for example, demonstrate the move away from Google already. Bing is featured as the default search engine on the Xbox 360. Geographically Google is, arguably,  a lost leader in Asian markets already. Understanding that Google does not monopolize all countries should be an indication of how other models are evolving market standards.

My grandpa used to say the difference between reading a magazine and a newspaper in the bathroom is the same as using a mallet or a fly swatter to kill a fly. If pressed on the vague analogy he would stop short of crudeness saying something along the lines of “we never had toilet paper in those days.”

We are inundated with the solutions to non-problems. One example is how our media outlets extenuate these non-problems by pushing the wonderfulness of phone apps, and last week’s New York Times article by Paul Boutin is a case in point. Putting aside the naivete (he obviously doesn’t use his camera) that 60 megabytes per month is sufficient storage, or even that a paid gigabyte per month would be enough, he does admit the casualty of putting yet another utility on your phone.

The only real downside with Evernote is that it has so many features, which can make getting started with the app daunting. But once you understand how to do a few things with it, you can get working and worry about the rest later.

Complicating our lives with an ever-expanding array of bells and whistles, feature creep is the scourge of us all.

The worst thing a website can do is to do too much. Companies like Apple and Google have succeeded by stripping down features and relying on interface simplicity. We should do the same with the devices we overlay on our lives. It’s one thing to enjoy the quirky features and fun modes that apps provide on our mobile devices, but it’s quite another to buy into the notion that loading another app on your phone is going to simplify your life.