Google Becoming Irrelevant: Social Search to Own 70% of Searching by 2013

Google’s search marketing services may be becoming irrelevant due to the rise of social search. That’s in addition to a failure to recognize that Google+ cannot be the sole solution to social search with an always increasing number of web properties.

Info-Tech Research Group expects that Google, which held 90% of the search market in 2010, will only hold 30% in 2013, due to the rising impact of social search. Most major research companies have struggled to recognize this as they measure search market share by search engine rather than the whole search paradigm.

Google in the United States still leads with about 66% of search engine market share, according to traditional research, with Microsoft’s properties next at around 15%.

Hubspot’s Founder and CEO Brian Halligan told the mesh conference in Toronto this week that his company was founded five years ago because the old marketing playbook was broken. Halligan explained to the mesh audience parts of the new playbook which are increasingly working against Google.

Halligan said that social media marketing and inbound marketing are more appealing because you own the marketing content versus renting it. If you think about it, you are renting search and display ads from Google, for example.  A company’s marketing content can then escalate over time versus being dropped from the billboard, webpage, or airwaves.

Halligan continued in saying that content marketing is changing. It used to be about search engine optimization for certain keywords within an article but is now mostly about the title as almost everyone uses an aggregator. That it is no longer about being found, but rather about the call to action after producing some really good quality content. Halligan says that because Google has found ways to prevent you from cheating the search system time and time again, and you now have to be wicked smart.

Well, perhaps wicked smart not to use Google, per se, if you want to do well in SEO today.

There is a shift beyond text-based search engine optimization. Audio, video, image, and other forms of unknown SEO to most will have a whole other set of ramifications in a new age of the Internet brought on by HTML5. That is the new web standard despite the problem of a fragmented web with many different sets of browser capabilities.

Still, integrating newer forms of SEO will create “blended content” like search results as CEO Larry Page used the term recently. This is why Google believes that social media search engine networks as Microsoft is calling theirs could be the biggest winners.

Yet, Google’s version of social search is more about linking to their own web properties over others. That’s something that may cost them in the long run. It doesn’t help that they have destroyed relationships with Twitter and Facebook in the past. And now Google has made a feeble attempt recently to take market share from Wikipedia by introducing the Knowledge Graph and loosely integrating Google+ with it.

But as Google rammed Google+ down people’s throats, Microsoft took a much cleaner approach – helping people like me understand the value of a social search network. A social search network in theory could potentially wrap around the rapidly increasing social search representation. Microsoft re-invented social search altogether and launched a social search network beside it. And it’s receiving interesting reviews.

Besides, it seems Google is just racing against time to fix yet another broken foray into social media – before social search makes the original Google search engine itself increasingly irrelevant.

Microsoft is making a potential comeback!