Google search, and our dependence upon it..

While reading the blog post of a fellow sitepointer the other week, I couldn’t help but agree with Mike when he said if Google stopped functioning by some freak accident then it would be nothing short of a catastrophe for the rest of the world.

He makes a good point given he had first hand experience of being disconnected from Google search for a short while, but what interested me was that he found the alternative search engines not quite as accurate for him as google was.

The ecomonic implications of Google’s other businesses are something else to wonder, but I’m really more interested in exploring if our generation of web surfers are engendered to Google and its algorithmic search results. I’m pinning this down to Google’s one pioneroing webservice because search is something which we all rely upon, and why we rely upon Google results so heavily.

I’ve tried to wean myself off Google by testing and purpose-searching other services. I’ve done this, and like Mike I’ve never really been completely satisfied. For some searches the alternative search engines can be more ‘enlightening’, and I say that to mean sometimes Google is too formulaic. If I want to be surprised, I’ll not use Google. If I know what I want Google beats the rest hands down.

But why is this though? Is it perhaps because I know what to expect from Google, and because I use it so often then I know how to cater my search terms to receive what I’m looking for (If anyone has any data or links on an average of Google searches per-person per-day, that would be cool, post a comment and give me some links!)? I often expect a Wikipedia result on the first page SERP for example, and that is handy if you just want to grab a quick overview of something. Same goes for the IMDB, I expect it to be there if I search for a movie name. Even if I want a quick spell checker Google usually suggests to you what you might want to be searching for.

This whole dependency would probably please the folk over at Google Search HQ. It’s exactly how they want it to be. I don’t care whether that strikes fear in your heart or not, but it remains that Google dominates search and probably will continue to do so as long as we all know what to expect from it. If Google radically altered its algorithm and we didn’t see what we expected, that would probably turn us away from their search.

It still remains that for a website publisher, Google-SEO is so well documented and commented on that I’ve conformed to that breed that states if you do well in Google you’re on a winner, and most of my sites do better in Google than the other search engines. 90% of traffic to my sites is Google generated. There is an argument that if Google search ceased to function, people would flock to the alternatives, and therefor traffic could remain stable via more visitors to those engines equals the same amount of searches etc.

What do you think about this honestly? Do you think we are all so reliant on Google Search than others just don’t compare in their SERP offerings? Another point: Are you (like me) more forgiving of other search engines when searching and actually spend the time going through their SERP pages while expecting Google to have it there for you on the first SERP? I know I am generally more forgiving of the others when doing this, and my SERP click through rate is probably higher on other search engines than on Google.

I simply expect Google to have what I want, and I am so used to using Google that I know how to tailor my search query to find what I want. What about you?