Who are Google' s competitors (Core Business and General)
Major Competitors
Google's major competitors are Yahoo! Inc and Microsfot Corporation.
Yahoo! Inc.
Introduction to Yahoo! Inc.
(from Wikipedia)
Yahoo! Inc. NASDAQ: YHOO is an American computer services company with a mission to "be the most essential global Internet service for consumers and businesses". It operates an Internet portal, the Yahoo! Directory and a host of other services including the popular Yahoo! Mail. It was founded by Stanford graduate students David Filo and Jerry Yang in January 1994 and incorporated on March 2, 1995. The company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.
According to Alexa Internet and Netcraft, both of which are Web trends companies, Yahoo! is the most visited website on the Internet today. The global network of Yahoo! websites received 3.4 billion page views per day on average as of October 2005.
Yahoo!'s core business
Being the most visited web portal in the world. Yahoo! Inc. not only provides a search engine, but also involves in other services like news, sports and weather, furthermore, Yahoo! offers e-mail, instant messaging, travel, auctions, classified ads, discussion groups, Web hosting etc.
Since Yahoo! started as a online searching service providing company, all its other services actually originated from its renowned search engine and also web directory. Therefore, search engine remains one of Yahoo!'s core businesses.
Microsoft Corporation
Introduction to Microsoft Corporation
(from Wikipedia)
Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT, HKEx: 4338) is the world's largest software corporation, with 2005 global annual sales of close to $40 billion USD and about 64,000 employees in 85 countries and regions. Headquartered in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products for computing devices. Its most popular products are the Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office suite of productivity software, each of which has achieved near ubiquity in the desktop computer market. Microsoft possesses footholds in other markets, with assets such as the MSNBC cable television network, the MSN Internet portal, and the Microsoft Encarta multimedia encyclopedia. The company also markets home entertainment products, such as the Xbox and MSN TV.
Microsoft's core business
Although Microsoft also involves in different fields like online search engine market(www.msn.com), instant messaging(MSN messenger), gaming industry(X-Box) and TV network(MSNBC) etc, its core business is still focused on software manufacture. Its dominance of operating system and office software contributes most to its huge profit.
Minor Competitors
American Online
Introduction to American Online
(from Wikipedia)
America Online, or AOL for short, is a U.S.-based online service provider, Internet service provider, and media company operated by Time Warner. Based in Dulles, Virginia, a community in Loudoun County, Virginia, with regional branches around the world, it is by far the most successful proprietary online service, with more than 32 million subscribers at one point in the US, Canada, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Latin America (declared bankrupt in 2004), Japan and formerly Russia.
Due to the new development of braod band network technology, AOL's number of subscribers is shrinking. Therefore, AOL successfully launched a Broadban program to maintain its members.According to Searchenginewatch.com, AOL Search still occupies about 6.9% of search engine market share. Furthermore, Google has purchased 5% of AOL's stock and built a partnership with AOL.
Due to Google's stock purchase and partnership with AOL, AOL is no longer considered as a major competitor for Google.
AOL's core business
Generally speaking AOL is an internet service provider which used to be specialized in dial-up internect access service. And AOL Search is also considered as one of its core businesses.
Baidu
Introduction to Baidu
Baidu (百度) NASDAQ: BIDU is a popular Chinese search engine. Its design resembles that of Google and features the capability to search news and images, among other functionalities. Baidu claims itself the biggest search engine in Chinese language. As of December 2005, it is the fourth most visited site on the Internet. Baidu translates to "hundreds of times" in English. There have been reports lately that Baidu's leadership in the Chinese language search engine industry is losing its share to Google.
The most popular feature about Baidu that it supports MP3 search. This is very similar with the image search of Google, however, it searches for MP3/WMA/SWF files instead of image files. The MP3 search are mainly used for Chinese Pop Music, and the search results are surprisingly accurate. Though it's illegal in most of the world, Baidu can do this as the Chinese law doesn't prohibit putting music on the internet, and Baidu is under Chinese law.
As Google launched its Google.cn Chinese search engine, the competition between the current No.1 Chinese search engine and the World No.1 search engine is just getting started.
Baidu's core business
Online search and MP3 search are the two core businesses for Baidu.