by Shawn Schafer

Created on: January 31, 2009   Last Updated: February 27, 2009

There are many things that contribute to the popularity of Google, but I am of the opinion that its simplicity is the main reason for its domination of the search engine industry.

Take a look at google.com. What do you see? A search bar, a small image of the Google logo, and a few simple links to other things. Thats it. Now go to yahoo.com. What do you see? A search bar, news and weather, 50 ads, and way too many pictures. Sure, it's nice to be able to go to one place for all your searching, news, and entertainment needs, but most of the time you don't want all of that, most of the time you just want to search the dang Internet. Because of it's simple design, Google is among the fastest search engines to load among its competitors. And if you want all the other crap at google, you can get it with merely another click. And guess what? the 'other crap' loads faster too, because Google keeps things simple there too.

An example of this is the increasingly popular Google email, Gmail. Coompare it to yahoo email. Yahoo email takes forever to load because it advertises with pictures while you're viewing your email and it has a complicated interface design. Gmail has a simple but intuitive interface, and the ads are few, non-graphical, an unobtrusive. And because of Googles '800 pound gorilla' status in the Internet industry, they can afford to provide you over 7 GB of storage space, much more than any of their competitors. And Google has integrated their IM client into Gmail, meaning that if you miss an IM on Google Talk, it will go straight to your Gmail.

Now the problem with other search engines that are as simple as Google is their lack of function. They're fine if you want to conduct a broad search but if you want to do other things or fine tune your search you often run into problems or a lack of results. Google, on the other hand, is simple without losing any functionality. The advanced search button works very well, and you can refine your results to other things with no problems. To clarify this I will use an analogy of supermarkets and convenience stores. Simple search engines other than Google tend to be like convenience stores, they work for little searches but if you want to do much else you have to go somewhere else. Google's complex competitors are like super markets, they're good if you want to check the news, your email, and the weather and maybe even listen to some music, but there is no reason to go to them if you just want to search. Google is like a convenience store within the parking lot of a super market. If you just want to do a simple search, its perfect, and it remains perfect if you want to do anything and everything else.

The inventors, owners, and web designers of Google are geniouses; they have figured out how to make advertisers and searchers happy at the same time, and provided everything you might need on the Internet all in one convenient place, while still keeping it easy and lightning quick to just search.

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