Rankings shift for search engines

With a blog post titled "11. 1. '11 - #1," Google was quick to herald the news Jan. 11 that it had finally overtaken local Web portal Seznam as the biggest search engine in the country - but the reality is harder to pinpoint. Concrete numbers are in fact hard to come by for search engines, experts and Seznam point out.

"It's very difficult," said Mike Grehan, publisher of Searchenginewatch.com and global vice president at Incisive Media. "I've been in the industry since 1995, and I know the methods people use to try to put figures [on search engine use] to look at growth, and it depends who's providing the figures."

Toplist, an Internet search company, released data that put Google's share at 50.66 percent of the domestic market, trailed by Seznam.cz with 48.63 percent.

The shift involves a small number of percentage points, but the ranking is a significant one, as the country has been one of only four where Google has not been able to grab the top spot.

"This isn't about winning the market," Google Czech Republic Marketing Director Luděk Motyčka told The Prague Post, and characterized the Toplist data as simply "a good sign."

But Seznam counters that Toplist's data isn't a representative sample, as it uses only its websites to tally where users have been directed from. Toplist culled data from 1,000 websites, but the most visited of these only ranks 46th among Czech websites, said Seznam Marketing Director Michal Vodák. Furthermore, the data includes not only visitors directed from the Google.cz site, but from its Slovak site, Google.sk, as well as from Google.com. Seznam, on the other hand, is only present on the Czech market.

"This data is from Web servers that are run by Toplist, so it's really just a small snapshot of the Czech Internet," Vodák told The Prague Post. Seznam instead prefers to go by numbers from what it calls the official data monitoring site, Net Monitor, an organization Seznam participates in by providing its own data. According to global company policy, however, Google does not provide its data to third parties. In an update to its Jan. 11 post, Tana le Moigne, director of Google Czech Republic, admitted after an influx of responses that Toplist's data is just one part of the whole picture.

"You're right, it's just the first small success according to one methodology/source in terms of visitors brought to Czech sites by Google," she wrote. "What pleases us is the development."

Seznam launched a comprehensive marketing campaign Jan. 12 with the goal of reminding users just how many services - more than 20 - are in fact under the Seznam umbrella, including map service Mapy.cz, Web mail, news server Novinky.cz, business directory Firmy.cz and social network Lide.cz. The web portal has also unveiled a new tagline, from the original "Seznam: I find there what I do not know" to the updated "Seznam: I find there what I'm searching for," to reflect the changing role of the Internet, Vodák said.

Seznam has long been the only European holdout against total Google dominance, and whether that is or will remain the case, there remains a place on the market for smaller, local Web portals, said Netherlands-based consultant, Bas van den Beld, who runs Stateofsearch.com. EU countries all have their country-specific portals, although they've enjoyed much lower market shares than Seznam's.

"I have a hunch these sites will stick around, especially in Europe, where you have the cultural aspect that affects how they work," van den Beld told The Prague Post. "It's one of the reasons Seznam is so big. It's Czech, and people like the fact that it's Czech, and that's why they stick with it. I think it's the same with other search engines."

Seznam's strategy for the future hinges on being able to constantly innovate, Vodák said, and will continue adding products to its already large stable of services and brands. That effort has so far set it apart from Google in that its use isn't solely as a search engine. Visit Seznam's website, and the difference is clear even to a non-Czech speaker: The busier home page is filled with links and services meant to keep users on Seznam's network for as long as possible. The model is more similar to that of Yahoo!'s in the United States, Grehan said.

"It's not an apples-for-apples comparison at the end of day," he said. "Google is quite specifically a search engine, whereas Seznam is a portal site - you can read news, check your e-mail and do all sorts of things, and then maybe eventually use the search function."

Google has the worldwide infrastructure, money and technology to move easily into markets, but language can still stall the company's quest for being the ideal model, Grehan added. Its technology is based on algorithms written in English, after all, and must be adapted to different languages and even characters.

The competition-killer may come with the Internet giant's Google Places, a version of Google Maps that is on its way to incorporating local businesses, and their advertising, he said. With offices in different markets, Google's presence and what it's able to offer advertisers will be hard to beat.

"They're offering new opportunities for both local and mobile advertising, and that's going to be hard to ward off ... for Seznam," Grehan said. "For local services, you can emulate the technology, but what you can't emulate and what would be a difficult feat for anyone would be to match the huge global infrastructure of Google, which has data centers all over the world handling up to 50 terabytes of data every day."

Claire Compton can be reached at
ccompton@praguepost.com