Top eight competitors of Google

1  APPLE

Being from partners to rivals, Apple is one of the toughest opponents for Google in the year 2010. Today, Apple and Google have been locking their horns in the field of Smartphone, Mobile App Store, OS, Mobile Ad, and Online Music and so on.

 

Likewise, Apple is more than up to the task of battling Google in these areas as well as browsers, where Google Chrome competes against Apple Safari. But battle between will intensify, as the market for the digital music and SmartPhones is all set for growth in 2010. Google’s music search along with its partner MySpace and Pandora are looking to compete with Apple’s iTunes, which was the No 1 music retailer in United States in 2009. Further, Google’s Android will have tough time as Apple’s iPhones continues to grab hold of the market all round the globe. 

2 MICROSOFT
 Microsoft has one of the most dominant impact in the IT industry. So without a doubt it is Google’s biggest adversary in 2010 and these two giants will be locking their horns for market supremacy in areas such as search, collaboration tools and browsers.

Talking of these two giants, Google has reigned as leaders in search, but with release of BING in May 2009, Microsoft has raised few questions amongst in Google’s management team. With features such as ranking search results based on relevancy to other users, Microsoft has linked Bing-related deals with Twitter, Facebook and Yahoo.

Microsoft have enhanced Bing, adding image search and mapping. But in response Google have unveiled real time search. In December, Google also added a photo search capability, a dictionary and a translator that finds relevant content in 40 languages. Entering 2010, Google still dominates search, with more than 70% of the market. Apart from search, the battle is likely to focus on cloud based collaboration tool.

3 AMAZON
In 2009, Google’s effort of scanning millions of out-of-print books and incorporating them in online search did gain up some momentum and helped themselves to publish over 500000 digital books for free to customers of Sony Reader and Barnes & Noble Nook, which is due in January. Further, there claims of opening up Google Editions, an e-book store, has opened up new rivalry with Amazon.
 

4 FACEBOOK
Facebook, probably the most popular stuff in the internet right now, has attracted 350 million active users in just six years and is subject of interest for the guys at Google too.
 

In 2010, Google and Facebook rivalry is likely to heat up based on question that about the way people will find their information in future. With ever increasing use of social networking and the rise of Facebook, Google’s worry seems to be a viable one.

Orkut offers Google Friend Connect, a tool for Web publishers to add social networking content to their sites, in direct competition with similarly named Facebook Connect.

5  MOZILLA

 With release of Google Chrome, Google has stepped into ever so popular browse battle. Mozilla has been in the markets for years and now this step from Google is likely to create the conflict of interest between these two.

Of late, the war between the two has heated up even more. The battle has now gone to the default search. Mozilla now has shown intent to kick Google out from its default search engine status. The latest rumours on the internet show that Mozilla is now eyeing to get a deal with Microsoft to make Bing as its default search engine in Firefox.

6 YAHOO

When it comes to search, one of Google’s biggest competitors besides Microsoft is Yahoo. Yahoo has been in the market with variety of products in areas of email, Messenger, News, Search and Analytics services.

So without doubt it will be a fearsome competitor for Google. In 2009, Yahoo made some improvements by integrating search with its rich content. Users can watch videos or stream music straight from the Yahoo search results page.

7  IBM
By now it’s quite crystal clear that 2011 will the year where big internet giants will be trying to gain whole lot of market share that will be up for grab in areas of collaboration tools. So, 2011 is likely to reopen Google’s rivalry with IBM with the release of new collaboration tools such as Google Wave.

Google has stepped into the battle field with its low cost hosted collaboration tools such as Google Apps. Google will compete against IBM’s Lotus Lives, which has attracted more than 2 million businesses in the last two years.

8  TWITTER
No doubt if Facebook is in rise, than it’s no difference with Twitter. If social networking is the way to go, then Google will certainly find Twitter in its way.

 

Twitter, a micro-blogging site, has in a way revolutionized the way we communicate these days.So, Google’s Friend Connect will face tough competitions for Twitter’s Connect in 2011 as Twitter looks to move up the rank in the areas of Social Networking.