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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Is Google all it's cracked up to be?
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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Dare Obasanjo asks some good questions about Google - are they prepped to be a flash in the pan, or a long term business? Here's the primary question:
http://www.google.com is non-sticky: Nothing on the main Google site encourages the user to hang around the site or even return to the website besides the quality of the search results. According to the company's founders this is by design. The problem with this reasoning is that if and when its competitors such as MSN Search and Yahoo! Search get good enough there isn't anything keeping people tied to the site. It seems unfathomable now but there was a time that it seemed unfathomable that anyone would use anything besides AltaVista or Excite to search the Web. It's happened before and it can happen again. Google seems ill-prepared for this occurence.
He raises a lot of other good points as well - the one above just strikes me as particularly cogent. I do recall thinking of AltaVista as the best search site years ago - and I really only go to Google for search. I rarely look at Google news, and - even with the hype - I'm still not impressed by GMail (mind you, I'm a skeptic of server based email in general, so this is not a Google specific issue for me). In any case, Dare raises some good questions. Food for thought...
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