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How To Beat Google According To Mark Cuban
By Daya Baran at May 15, 2008 10 CommentsBlog Maverick - Mark Cuban has added his voice to the chorus on beating Google. Cuban presents a plausible argument. He argues that in essence, its no different that any other content aggregation play. Its paying for content. Here it is:
Is there anything more fun than sitting around, growing your hair, drinking a Bud while listening to Jethro Tull and pondering how to change the balance of power in the search world and unseat Google?
Better search? Too subjective. Better monetization? After the fact. Better User Interface? Will we know it when we see it? A new and different search? Semantic? Human powered? We won’t know till we know.
But what about the Google Index, all the websites that are indexed by Google? What is it worth to be in the Google Index? What would you, as a website owner require in order to remove your site from the Google Index and no longer be available when someone does a google search?
It should just be a matter of dollars and cents and sense, shouldn’t it?
How many websites would have to recuse themselves from the Google Index before Google Search was negatively impacted?
Mahalo.com thinks it needs to support the 25K most common search terms in order to be successful. What would happen if MicroSoft or Yahoo or a MicroHoo went to the 5 top results for the top 25K searches and paid them to leave the Google Index?
A theoretical maximum of 125K sites, but with overlap, probably closer to 100K or less, times how much per site on average?
The math starts to get interesting. At $1,000 per site average times 100K sites, thats only $1 Billion Dollars. The distribution would obviously favor the larger sites, so of that billion dollars, would the top 1K sites take 500K each and the remaining 99K split the rest?
Given the stakes, why stop at $1 Billion Dollars? Would the top 1k most visited sites take a cool $1mm each, plus a committment from MicroSoft or Yahoo to drive traffic through their search engines to more than make up for the lost Google Traffic. After all, once consumers realized that Google no longer had valid search results for the top 25K searchs, that traffic would most likely go to MicroSoft and Yahoo.
And why we are at it, why not require that these 100k sites switch from Googles Publisher Network to Yahoo’s or MicroSofts? It would start to earn back the $1 Billion paid out very quickly.
On top of that, in order to grease the skids even further, why not issue advertising credits to the sites that switched off Google? Its soft dollars, that would sweeten the pot and drive more traffic.
IN essence, its no different that any other content aggregation play. Its paying for content. But, it would take some big ones to go for it and see if it worked. However, without question, every search engine has some number of core sites, that when removed from its index, destabilizes the value of its search.
The question is how many? What would it cost to get that number of sites to turn Google off and stay off, and would the traffic created as users switch from Google more than compensate for the cost?
Or would Google recognize the risk and jump in and offer more to websites to stay?
Sure would be interesting to find out.
Labels: Microsoft, Online Advertising, Yahoo
10 Comments
Good for business maybe - terrible for users. Everyone would soon be going to three different search engines to find the best result.
Interesting, I only know one way to work google, and that is by following the google webmaster guidelines. You can stay within their simple guidelines and still find seo secrets.
Unfortunately it is a pipe dream.
The concept is based on absolutely ridiculous assumption that
only the 25K most common search terms are needed in order to be successful.
Who told that? There are ~10,000,000,000,000 legitimate search queries of 1,2,3 terms. We collected 50M most popular search queries and it is not enough.
As a result of the proposed action $1B will be spent and 100K most popular sites will be replaced with 100K new “most popular sites”.
Just $1000 to persuade a business to de-list itself from google!? Why would I risk loosing my identity on the most used search engine only to find a place on a sparingly used engine? Wouldnt I be risking myself becoming a sparingly searched item as well? And what if the ms yahoo plan fails, how long will it take for me to regain my priority search status at Google? No way I am not going to buy this…
Why dont we try it?
Errr…. $1,000 * 100K = $100 million, not $1 billion. This plan needs a bit of due diligence before proceeding…
bob wyman
I would like some assistance from other folks on this post. To believe Mark Cuban we have to assume / check a few things.
Lets quantify what it would take to overtake Google and become the #1 search engine. According to Comscore, Google’s share on search is ~60% vs Yahoo’s + Microsoft combined is ~33%. Assume that Microsoft buys Yahoo, and all of Google’s search share loss goes to MicroHoo, it means Google has to drop by 12-13%.
Here are my questions:
Assumption #1: delisting SITES causes a drop in search engine popularity. Is this true, and if so how do we know this? Do people search for SITES or for SEARCH TERMS? I personally search on search terms because if I knew the site, I would just go to it. Every so often I don’t recall a site’s URL, and therefore search for the site on Google, but that’s not very frequent. I realize that SEARCH TERMS and SITES are correlated but the question is - how correlated? Is searching for “Paris Hilton” is the same thing as searching on a specific site (therefore delisting that site from Google would presumably reduce the attractiveness of Google). How correlated? If the degree of correlation is low, then the number of sites to be delisted would need to be higher in order to cause search engine share loss. And vice vera.
Assumption #2: Delisting 25K sites causes a 12-13% search share loss for Google. (We are now assuming on good faith that the degree of correlation between search terms and sites is high and therefore dropping certain sites means a reduction in search engine results.) How do we know that the magic number for a 12-13% Google search share loss is 25K Sites? Cuban states Mahalo as his source. Anyone have more info on this? In order for this assumption to be true, the popularity of sites on the net must drop off extremely steeply, with a very long tail. Then shouldn’t we see a similar ad revenue concentration for Google?
Assumption #3: The top sites will agree to be delisted if MicroHoo pays them $1M. My intuition tells me that the top sites get a whole lot more traffic than $1M worth from Google (based on ad sales), and therefore would NOT agree to be delisted from Google index for that sum of money. If the top 25K sites drive ~10-15% search engine share, then they *must* each derive a whole lot more than $1M in revenues from Google you would think.
Anyone else care to comment? Lets please take these one by one so we have a real debate.
I’m gonna tell this to Carl Icahn. How much will he pay me for cautioning him? Even if he pays .01% of his offering price, I will be happy and throw a party to my WebGuild pals.
This is a great idea. If all the top sites are gone from Goggle then the competing sites that may be better than goggles current picks will be replace with new ones.
Even thought most of my sites place on first page of results in goggle, I would love to have new clients to have to create SEO campaigns for. (plug for my services.)
Remember what is hot today, will be gone tomorrow.
In short i think Goggle really determines what is hot and what is not. So why should they care.
The ones that will be hurt are the current top sites, as amazon is replaced by someone new.
I read this because Mark Cuban is a smart guy and I figured this would be a smart idea.
OK, I was wrong.