I was reading this interesting article about the power of Google and its near monopoly over internet search and it got me to thinking about how the big G's increasing desire to do everything is having a detrimental effect on smaller publishers, like little ol' me.

I have a website which is a directory of computer support companies. It has high rankings on Google for a number of terms like "computer support" and "computer support + location". This high ranking then enables me to sell premium listing space to companies that want a guaranteed top listing on my pages.

Recently I have noticed that Google has been extending its "local business search" into the area of computer support and on many of the listings at which I was number one in the organic results, I am still number one but below a whole load of Google's own results for computer support companies in that area. This immediately means I will get less traffic and damages my site as a business because my premium listings are a less attractive proposition to advertisers.



I don't say that my site has some automatic right to be found first. It's Google's search engine after all, and I'm sure they and many others would say it's a good thing if they can help people get the information they want quickly and without fuss - and they may be right - but from a publisher's point of view, it's still pretty galling to see this giant extending itself ever further and at a stroke demoting competitor data providers. As the article I highlighted earlier says, if one company is to be some kind of universal gateway to information, that isn't a healthy thing.

But are there any obvious threats to Google's position? Well, there's still Yahoo!, MSN and Ask of course but despite their efforts (even resorting to paying people), they seem incapable of being really serious challengers. Perhaps the most interesting player could be Wikia search from the people behind Wikipedia. It's still early days with that project and the results are nothing to write home about yet, but imagine for a second that they managed to get it right. And then say that one day, at the top of every Wikipedia page appeared a new form to search the wikipedia and to "search the web". They could very well get a nice little slice of the search market at a stroke, and people may sit back and wonder of Google, "how do you like them apples?"