It is fair to say that while Google’s domination of search is generally frowned upon it probably is slightly better than a highly fragmented market with lots of players, especially if this is verticality structured. However, one thing that is a pretty safe bet is that AOL and ESPN’s new services won’t kill Google’s dominance of search.
Why? Because they rely on users adding things into the address bar. Steve Rubel reports on Love.com and ESPN’s latest foray into search.
Several sites, however, are now looking to snatch their traffic back from Google by letting consumers easily execute searches from and curate content on the fly, all from the address bar. Three such sites include AOL’s newly relaunched Love.com, ESPN and IceRocket. The goal is to make it easy to search from the address bar by tacking on a word to the domain.
Although it sounds like a great idea it has been noted for sometime that users have simply stopped using the address bar, the fact that search terms such as Google and Yahoo rank as some of the top searches on Google itself just shows what’s happening. We type into Google and expect the result, even if we misspell Google will ask ‘did you mean’.
That said, the services are quite good, mixing different source material together in groups, such as video, Twitter, web etc. Similar to Cuil.