Google admits it's failing

Google admits it's failing
Originally uploaded by Philipbradley.

A slight mock up here of the kind of messages Google is giving us for searches on 'photo sharing' 'blogs' and 'calendar'. Basically they're trying to push their own products onto us. Now, if these were any good in the first instance, they'd be right at the top of the list anyway.

However, they're not. Mind you, when you do a search for 'search engine' on Google, the search engine itself is only in fourth place, so it's not doing so well there either. I'm surprised that they're doing this - on the one hand you could argue that it's self promotion, but on the other hand, it's an admission of failure.

They've already dumped their Q&A resource - is it time for the people who work in some of these others to worry as well? And, more to the point, what about those of us out there who use their stuff?

Comments

[Andrew]

Just a touch of hyperbole here, don't you think? Is Picasa failing, for example? Seems outstanding to me, particularly since they introduced the online album service which is a heck of a lot easier to use than Flickr, in my view.

[Phil Bradley]

Hi Andrew,
Thanks for taking the time to comment, but I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one. I don't think it's hyperbole at all. Despite the fact that you think it's a great product, most people don't appear to agree with you... it's 22nd on a list of the top 33 Google properties with a 0.04% share. If you run a search for Picasa on Google you get 11,800,000 hits and for Flickr you get 148,000,000 which is a fairly substantial difference.

Of course, it depends on what exactly you mean by 'failure'. The product may well be very good, as you say. However, if that message isn't getting across, and clearly it isn't, then *that* is the failure.