The San Francisco Chronicle has just run through some of the groups that are afraid of Google, includin gthe Silicon Valley tech industry, Madison Avenue, Hollywood and privacy advocates in Who's Afraid of Google?
Of course, Google scares virtually everybody except its users. Even the people whose businesses depend on Google -- whether that's for traffic from search or cash from adwords or whatever -- are scared because tiny changes in Google algorithms can have a devastating effect. Or, worse, they can be removed from Google's index altogether.
The story says:
Rich Skrenta, chief executive of Topix, a local news and community forums Web site in Palo Alto, described Google as being so ahead of everyone else that there is no real No. 2. Startup executives cower at mounting a challenge, he said.
"It's past fear -- it's the stages of grief, it's resignation -- and now everyone's depressed," Skrenta said.
There's a balancing section near the end where Ellen Siminoff, chief executive of Efficient Frontier, a Mountain View search engine advertising company, points out that "power shifts quickly in the technology industry, judging from recent history." She says:
"There was a time when Netscape could do no wrong and a time when AOL could do no wrong, and then Yahoo could do no wrong," she said. "Now Google can do no wrong, but that can change."
Sure, but Netscpe, AOL and Yahoo didn't have a really efficient way of monetising their traffic the way Google does. For most of the sites that are not Google, it boils down to a simple choice: either you stop Google from accessing your content, in which case you may not have a viable business, or you fight your way up the search rankings, in which case it's Google that rakes in the money.
