The Future Of Search
Yesterday’s MediaTel Group seminar on the future of digital covered a lot of ground, and one of the subjects which the assembled panelists were keen to discuss was search and Google’s dominance of the market.
Greg Grimmer, managing director of Zed Media, said: “It’s plateaued in the US. I think it’s still over 90% of Google’s revenue but they are very clever people. They know that they need to diversify but that is their business model at the moment.
“Categories in the UK – travel, finance, even retail and automotive – are reaching some sort of area where people are paying a premium for the Google clicks just to be there. My worry is that the marketing director of, for example, BT will sit there and put in BT Broadband and if it doesn’t come up first, he’s on the phone to me saying ‘Why?’ and you have to explain again how algorithmic search works again and the budget goes up and there’s a bit of land grab there. But without doubt, without any question, it’s not digital media, it’s not internet media, it’s Google that is the fashion and like all fashions it will decrease.
Andrew Walmsley, co-founder of i-level, said: “Is it [search] topped out? No, I don’t think it’s topped out. We’ve got continuing growth in audiences, continuing growth in penetration and audiences driven more and more by broadband, which is still growing, so there’s a continued supply of more and more content and more and more search.
“And we’ll also see search become more important in terms of how we find videos that we want to see. So yes, the search market has grown enormously, at a dizzying rate, yes i think we will see that growth slow but no, there’s a long way to go in the search market yet and we shouldn’t be limited by our current view of what search is.
Grimmer then added that Zed Media is currently working with Google on some research on the impact of TV advertising on their search results. He said: “You only have to have an ounce of common sense to realise that if you see a TV ad that has a URL on it or sometimes not even that, you can actually go to a search engine and type that in. It’s common sense.
Blake Chandlee, director of UK Media Sales at Yahoo! UK & Ireland, was quick to point out that despite Google’s dominance, it may not have it all it’s own way in the coming years.
He added that he believes that search will adapt to platforms such as mobile and take on new guises such as social search, which he claimed has already captured 20%-25% of the search market in Asia.
Adam Freeman, deputy commercial director, Guardian News and Media, said: I think we have to be very careful not to confuse search with Google, as Google is the all-pervasive brand in search at the moment, but actually search is much more about the community and the fabric of the internet. And also i think that vertical search is going to become an incredibly powerful tool. If you’re interested in specialist information it’s almost impossible to get that through a regular search engine.