Competitive Characteristics of External Environment
After dominating the web search industry since its search engine introduction in 1998, Google Inc. has drawn many competitors who try to provide millions of user worldwide with similar services. Many experts still believe that there is lots of room for others and as the result, Yahoo! Inc., LookSmart, Alltheweb, and Microsoft Corporation are all aiming to topple the industry¡¦s leader. Each of these competitors has its unique strategic plan against Google Inc. For example, Teoma (Gaelic for "expert") offers input from specialized sites created by experts. According to the article ¡§Thrill of hunt lures Google competitors¡¨ in USAToday by Jefferson Graham, ¡§Wisenut (owned by Look Smart which also supplies search technology to MSN) helps users with multiple ways to reword their searches to come up with better results¡¨ (USAToday). Alltheweb.com counters Google by providing ¡§specific search engines for MP3s, video and photographs on its little-advertised technology showcase site¡¨ (USAToday).
One of the key external competitive characteristics of Google is its entirely new algorithm for determining keyword relevance - PageRank. PageRank is an advance way of finding a web page¡¦s hypertext rather than just the text. According to an article written by web design expert, ¡§by analyzing these links Google effectively harnesses every web publisher not just to provide the content for the encyclopedia, but to rank every site and page on the Web for its index¡¨ (Designer-Info). The PageRank technology first finds the web pages with user¡¦s keyword then ¡§ranks the results according to "votes" that have built up over the time the page has existed on the Internet.¡¨ Furthermore, ¡§ ...