Poll: Google the best of the Web
(CNN) — The search engine Google is the most significant development in the 15-year history of the World Wide Web, according to a poll of CNN.com users. — Nearly 18,000 CNN.com users voted in the three-week online survey, part of Spark's look …
Context & Ripple Effects
The vote is a popularity snapshot with unusual reach behind it: nearly 18,000 [[a:none|CNN.com users]] ranked Google ahead of everything else from the Web's first fifteen years in Spark's three-week survey.
It lands at the end of a December in which Google's position was being reinforced on several fronts at once — a confirmed deal making it the default search in Opera Software's mobile browsers, a newly bolstered AOL relationship that coverage framed as the counterweight to a rumored Microsoft-Yahoo alliance, Google Video visits up 48% for the week ending December 24, and an API opened on Google Reader so third parties can build views on its feed backend.
First-order effects
- Google enters 2006 with both a popular-vote mandate and fresh distribution wins: confirmed default placement on Opera's mobile browsers and a deepened AOL partnership put its search box in front of more users without it buying the properties outright.
Second-order effects
- Rivals now have to compete for defaults rather than just users — the rumored Microsoft-Yahoo deal reported alongside the AOL relationship shows consolidation becoming the response to Google's reach, and every browser and portal deal becomes a bidding ground.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the industry organizes around a single dominant intermediary whose APIs (Reader's feed API is the early template) and default placements determine how publishers' content is aggregated and discovered — structural power shifting from site owners to whoever controls the entry point.
The trend: The Web's center of gravity is moving from portals and browsers to one dominant search intermediary, cemented through default deals and open APIs rather than ownership.