Soon We Will See Just How Loyal Search Users Are

      by Wyatt Walter

With today’s announcement that Canonical is changing the default search provider to Yahoo, Apple’s rumored talks with Microsoft, and cell phone providers such as Verizon also jumping to Bing, we may get to see just how big of a role the default settings have on people’s search preferences. Google has been dominating the search market pretty much since the beginning with a significant boost coming from the fact that Google is the default in several of the world’s browsers, though some of it is some good old-fashioned branding and marketing.

Canonical’s decision to change the Ubuntu default search engine and rumors that Apple may be soon to switch the default provider on the iPhone (I’m assuming with regular old Safari soon to follow), Google will no longer be the default on most of the major desktop OS’s of our time. Verizon has also struck a deal with Bing and made it the default search provider on its mobile phones. I personally was pretty mad the day that the Bing icon on my BlackBerry, but that’s a story for another day.

Citing concerns over privacy, there have been several who have spoken out against Google as well. Google has even stated that it is considering pulling out of the huge market of China.

Despite these things, Google’s search market share has continued to increase month after month. These next few months will be interesting to see what happens to market share as these talks fall into place. The true test of the Google brand will be for those users who have to go out of their way to choose Google as their search provider, rather than Google enjoying its nice defaults that it has enjoyed over the past few years.

Related Posts Related Websites

Tags: , , ,
Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Jan 28th, 2010

Leave a Reply