Liverpool

Introduction:

It is important to clarify that in conceptual terms, the customers of search industry’s companies are those whose need to be satisfied, is the advertising of their products or services and they pay for it. Its users are everyone who receives the search services for free.
1.- Discuss competition in the search industry. Which of the five competitive forces seem strongest?,Weakest?, What is your assessment of overall industry attractiveness?
Competition in the search industry has a large internal rivalry with very powerful actors such as Google and Microsoft among several others, with a very well-positioned leader, Google, and many competitors who have specialized in specific niches. The stronger competitive force is the entry barrier for new competitors who couldthreaten the main actors. Its weakest force is its ability to negotiate with buyers of the service (companies which buy advertising in order to be in pages of specific searching, related to their products).
2.- How is the search industry changing? What forces seem most likely to bring about major change to the industry within the next three to five years?
It is changing to the extent that mobiletechnologies of communication change because they make that all searchers must adapt their own technologies. The forces which can bring the greatest changes in the coming years are the innovation in the way of making the search, increasingly accessible and in real-time for all kinds of topics in various communications formats, such as voice, data and images. That is to say, the new users’ needsshould cause major changes in the industry and this in turn will motivate to change services’ offer of the search industry’s companies.
3.- What are the key factors that define success in the industry? What are the key competencies, capabilities, and resources of successful search engine companies?
The main factor which defines success in this industry is quality, relevance and accuracy ofsearch results. Another factor of success is the ability to generate the largest volume of visits to its WEB site, what will allow capturing greater investment in advertising and the greater return on this investment given by the amount of contacts for each ad. The most important core competence is being able to deliver successful searching results in a 100%. For doing so, the ability to extractinformation from any support and organize it in an appropriate way for a quick and effective search, is essential.
The greatest resource of a company is its human resources’ professional and innovation capacity and the technological platform which allows the company to extract the information available in the cyber space and transform it into classified information in the shortest possible time.4.- Describe Google’s business model. What are the company’s revenue-cost-profit relationships? What strategies has Google relied upon to build competitive advantage in the industry?
Google's business model changed starting from the 2000 and since then, it is dedicated to meet and create value for companies, which require advertising their products and services at a global, regional or local level.In order to create value for these customers, it gave life to one of the most powerful extraction tool of useful information, classification and organization of it, for then being able to put it in an objective and free way to the service of any citizen of the world with access to internet. The daily hundreds of millions visits of these users, provide it a very important market for anyone whowants to commercialize a product or service and who is willing to pay for this direct advertising on thematic pages, which are opened at each user’s request.
The strategy chosen by Google was that of differentiation, which gives a competitive advantage difficult to be imitated, since it is always innovating in its services and increasing them, and all that for free to its users, what generates...