Google’s Popularity Is No Accident!

Google is the king of all search engines, used by 53.6% of internet users. Many people believe that Google became the most popular search engine simply by providing a great tool. And while, this did contribute to the widespread use of their search engine and products, there were many other factors as well such as strategic partnerships, company acquisitions, and support of the developer community.

Strategic Partnerships

Google’s best move was probably its strategic partnerships. Some noteworthy companies that it has allied with include AOL, Mozilla, MySpace, and GeoEye.

Mozilla

Mozilla is the company that develops the open source Firefox browser, which has been steadily gaining in popularity over that last few years. To aid in Firefox development as well as maintain visibility, Google worked out a deal with Mozilla so that the default search engine and home page (upon install) would be Google.

MySpace

Similar to the Mozilla deal, Google partnered with MySpace to get advertising and provide a branded search engine for the website.

Company Acquisitions

Google has also been able to extend its reach and products by acquiring companies such as FeedBurner, YouTube, Blogger (by Pyra Labs) and DoubleClick.

YouTube

The YouTube acquisition enabled Google to improve their search results by embedding relevant YouTube media in the content. This has made the search engine even more user-friendly by enabling quicker access to desired content.

DoubleClick

If you use Adwords for pay-per-click advertising campaigns or monetize your website using Adsense, then you are already using Google’s proprietary products. It’s acquisition of DoubleClick, however, enabled it to reach even more publishers and offer additional advertising and marketing solutions such as pay-for-performance and affiliate advertising.

Catering to the Developer Community

The third important factor that helped catapult Google to number 1 was its support of the developer community.

To aid in development and encourage the use of its products, Google has created a robust API (Application Programming Interface) for the majority of its products which facilitates the integration into websites and custom applications. Even better, use of all products are free!

Some other contributions to the developer community include code repositories and extensive documentation on all of its products.

Looking Ahead

Google already has a suite of popular and useful products and continues to expand its offerings. In fact, it recently launched Google Chrome, its own feature-packed browser  which might even rival Firefox! And there are always new products or feature additions to existing products.

No doubt, Google’s market share will continue to increase. So it will be interesting to see how Google changes in the future, what new products it may add, as well as how it will take advantage of its near monopoly on internet search.

For more information on Google and other activities not mentioned here, check out its company page at Wikipedia.