13 September 2006 | Author: Andrew Girdwood Head of Strategy

Google clings to the number one slot

Remember when Google was not the number one search engine? You don't need to go too far back - it was July of this year.

The number one slot in question is not market share. Right now investors, media and search engine optimisers will debate whether Google's number one position in market share is assailable or not until the cows come home. Or should that be; until the spiders come home?

Google has not always held the number one position in Google for the search 'search engine'. The screen grab below comes from the news article 'Even Google struggles in the search playground' dated July 2006.




















Here we can see that industry stalwarts AltaVista and Dogpile force Google down into third position. The green ticks beside the URLs were produced by Site Advisor, recently bought by McAfee, which tell us that the site is free of virus infection.

Let's compare that old set of search results with one taken in September of 2006. Here we can see a possible new GUI for Google and that Google claims positions one and two. MSN pulls in at position three and AltaVista and Dogpile have been pushed down to four and five respectively.























Look how well Google.co.uk does. Therein lies a snag - this particular examination of Google's search results was conducted from an UK based IP address. To perform a more thorough investigation we should try the same search again but with an US based IP address.























We can see a similar set of results but this time Google.co.uk drops down to position four. Now MSN Search enjoys the lofty heights of position two and AltaVista pulls away from the meta search Dogpile. It looks as if Google.co.uk is Google's second most relevant offering for the search 'search engine'.

Is Google.co.uk the second most relevant Google for the search 'Google'? For most searchers in the United Kingdom - the answer is yes. The screen grab below shows the .com site ranking one, Google.co.uk coming in at two and Google.ca there in position three. The first vertical search interface to rank for 'Google' from this UK based IP address is Google Maps - and that's Google Maps global/US and not Google Maps UK.















The same search from an US based IP address has very different search results. The country versions of Google vanish, Google Maps still does well but it is Google Talk which leaps up from nowhere and claims position two. As the search engine has found the directory 'talk' and not the sub-domain 'talk' Google's results nest Google Talk under the main URL. To qualify for that nesting effect the Google Talk URL simply has to rank within the top 10. If it makes the first page then Google will lift it up in order to nest it immediately below the first www.google.com result. If you choose to ignore nested results then Google Maps does hold the two slot in this search.

















Users who search Google for 'Google' and request 100 results rather than the default 10 on the first page will see more nested results.

Readers who re-create these searches may well see different patterns in Google's results and this may also be due to the geographical association Google has for your IP address (where your IP address is a bit like your internet postcode). Personalised search information also allows Google to show different people different results. Google's tendency to show different results to searchers in different parts of the world is one of the challenges the few international search engine optimisation agencies face.

Google's number one in Google, they must be happy with that and we wonder whether they will check their own search engine's results after the next algorithm update or index refresh with the same enthusiasm which we do.

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