From Search to Share: How Google can win in Social Age

Google is one of the great success stories of internet age. Given its mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, it has achieved remarkable success by focusing on search results and monetizing clicks. But Google’s revenue model is under threat in the age of Social Media. Facebook recently surpassed Google in the US to become the most visited website (for more, see this and this).

What should Google do to continue its dominance in the Social Age? Think outside the box, “Search” box that is! Google has done a great job focusing on its core competency of indexing content on the web and displaying most relevant search results without any “noise” or “clutter” on the screen. And this is what made Google so popular in the first place.

But this strategy of indexing web content and displaying most relevant search results will no longer work in Social Age as users rely more on Social Media channels and less on search engines to get relevant information. Google should shift its strategy from Search to Share, to continue its dominance in the Social Age as people are more likely to pay attention to content from those they trust rather than ones suggested by search engines.

Facebook recently introduced some great changes to its service in order to leverage the power of Open Graph and “create a smarter, personalized web that gets better with every action taken” (for more, see Mark Zuckerberg’s blog post here). Google should up the ante on Facebook by introducing “Social Plugins” that will help collect, index and display content based on Social links. And this transformation from Search to Share involves thinking outside the Search box.

I want to end this post by sharing with you this great CNBC Video titled Inside the Mind of Google that explains very well Google’s success story. Enjoy the video!