Misunderstanding Google
post a comment | posted May 15
Mark Cuban writes in his post "Beating Google" that one way to beat Google is to pay the owners of sites in the top 5 slots of the results page for the most popular keywords to remove their sites from the Google index. Thus, Microsoft (or Yahoo or a new competitor) could claim "I'm the only search engine with results from Engadget, Techcrunch, WSJ, etc...."
There's a whole industry built up around doing exactly the opposite. It's called SEO. People pay other people ridiculous sums of money in order to make their site rank as high as possible on results pages for as many relevant keywords as possible in Google.
Furthermore, SEM is a similar industry that has grown up directly in contrast with Mark's idea. People see ranking highly in Google to be SO valuable, that they will pay to rank higher than their competitors for relevant keywords, and will pay on a performance basis per click (which, unlike SEO, is a marginal cost, not a fixed cost -- read: blackhole on your bottom line).
If the Search market is currently setup such that people are paying in order to get into Google, you have a rough sense of how valuable it is to be highly ranked in Google. So, the amount of money it would take a competitive search engine to incentivize websites to leave Google would be something like:
(Total SEO Spent by Top-Ranking Sites) + (Total SEM Spent by Top-Ranking Sites)
Which, considering Google's market cap (which only approximates the SEM side of this summation), is a ton of money. And this is just a calculation of the allowable of acquiring an internet visitor! The actual calculation that Mark is proposing is:
(value of a single visitor to a Top-Ranking Site) * (# of visitors driven by Google to a Top-Ranking Site)
which, is greater than the total SEM spend and SEO spend combined.... I just used the SEM/SEO spend combo to show you how large a sum of money Mark is talking about.
Time to go back to the drawing board on beating Google.