Google’s Marissa Mayer discusses an interesting strategy from Google in terms of expanding their search share, which also means expanding user profiling and ad targeting, via non-search oriented platforms, such as the Google Chrome browser.
CNet’s Matt Asay quotes Mayer from an O’Reilly Radar Interview ths week as stating that one reason for the launch of Chrome is to expand Internet usage and discovery :
We think that, overall, if you make the Web better, people use the Web more. And that ultimately benefits Google because we believe that search is a certain and rather fixed percentage of people’s online activities each day. It’s hovered right around 5 percent from the very beginning of the Internet…If that’s true, one way we can grow search is by gaining market share from other competitors. The other way we can gain share is by just growing the market overall, where we don’t necessarily gain share but we gain on overall volume.
So we have a number of things that we do that try and make the Web more pleasant and easy to use…As we looked at the browser market, people have gotten really good at rendering HTML. But there hasn’t been a lot of innovation. And there’s been almost no attention on JavaScript at all. And so we thought we could build a browser that is just a lot faster for the Web, and it’s much more optimized for JavaScript.
So, competition in the browser market leads to better overall usability and findability and if more people use the Internet more often and discover more sites, Google search share grows in overall volume … a giant mountain is first made of little specs of dust. An interesting zen like strategy from Google … do you buy it?
