Strategic Management

 

 

How attractive was the internet search industry as an arena in which to do business at the time of the
case? Does the attractiveness vary by segment? By competitor? Explain (briefly).
1- Use the porter five forces for the internet search industry
2- Each force in spirit paragraph
3- At the end, write conclusion summarizing all forces and explain if the industry (not google) was
attractive or not
4- Answer then (Does the attractiveness vary by segment? By competitor?)
5- Citations from the case text may be a page number [e.g., (p. 3)

 

Introduction

 

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A search engine is a software/programs that search documents or information for specified key words and shows the list of documents containing the keyword on the World Wide Web. The information may be in the form of web pages, images, a mix of both or other types of files and documents. In this article, we will discuss about the phase in which various web search engines started and its attractiveness in that particular period. We will discuss these with the help of Porter Five Forces analysis.
Porter’s Five Forces analysis
Porter’s five forces analysis is a structure which identifies and analyzes five competitive forces that are crucial for every industry; it also helps in determining the weaknesses and strengths of the industry (Porter, 2008). Below we will discuss the five forces that were crucial for the search industry.

 

Competition in the industry

 


When we look back in the history of web search engines, we see that the first search engine ‘Archie’ started in 1990a and within six years numerous competitors entered the search engine market like Web Crawler, Yahoo, Infoseek including the search engine giant Google. The competition in this industry is very high like, MSN, Bing, and snap, etc. have entered in this industry. With the rapid increase, growth and development in the technology and competition are very high, and it will not be a wonder when any new search engine comes out of the blue and lead this industry (Brin & Page, 2012).

 


Potential of new entrants into industry

 


It is evident from the past that there is every possibility for any new company to enter into the search engine industry. Technology has played a key role in bringing new entrants into the industry, for instance, Yahoo was doing great but with the introduction of Google in the market, Yahoo has lost its position (Gandal, 2001). It is very tough for any company to lead Google but still there is a possibility as various companies have entered into this industry. It can be said that there are free entry and exit in this industry.

 

Power of Suppliers

 


The search engines use the keywords to find the documents and information for which the user is looking for. When the user clicks on the link, another web page opens up which contains the documents with the keywords which means that the search engine redirects the user to another web page and this ‘another web page' is the ‘Supplier' which shows the documents and the user very easily use the documents/information available there. Only a few websites are there which asks for authentication or rights to read the documents. Therefore, it can be said that the suppliers of the information have minimal control over the search engines. Search engines act as agents for various companies to advertise their products and services so that the people browsing the search engine learn about the product and services sold by the companies. In this way, both the users as well as the companies get benefitted and this also enables the search engines to earn revenue (the companies pay the search engines for advertising their products/services) (Edelman and Eisenmann, 2010). 
 

 

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Power of Buyers

 


In this case, the search engines are the customers that show the information provided by the suppliers. Search engines have strong control over the suppliers as numerous sources of information are available online (Introne & Nossenbaum, 2000). It is the wish of the search engines whether they want to show the particular webpage or not to the users. For example, many search engines have banned certain websites that can't be accessed via them. These days, the search engines are paid by various companies for advertising them or their products. The companies are sponsored by the search engines and they pay the search engines only when a user clicks on the particular advertisements. These are called paid listings i.e. payments to the search engines are made on the basis of ‘per-click’ & ‘cost per-click’. The paid listings get affected by Coverage rates, Click-through rates, Average CPC and Revenue Splits (Edelman and Eisenmann, 2010). 

 


Threat of substitute products

 


As far as search engines are concerned, there is no substitute for them. Users can go for various search engines of their choice, but they can't go for any other medium to search something because such mediums are not available till date (Joachims, 2002). Everyone on the internet is dependent on search engines to search for their documents or information. Also, it is not possible to search for the information manually as it is impossible to go through each and every book/journal/article/notes etc. available in the world. Therefore, this industry has no threat for substitute products.
 
It can also be said that the attractiveness varies by segments as every search engines have specific features and characteristics. The user can see the difference in the working of the search engines by using them. Apart from this, search engines use different techniques to attract people; they appoint engineers to make programs and ideas different from their competitors in the market which results in providing ample options to the users.
 

 


Conclusion

 


It is very clear that with the use of advanced Information Technologies, the search engines companies try to come out with various new and additional features to attract more number of people. Search engine industry has grown a lot in the recent years, and Google search engine has brought a revolution in this industry. No other search engines are as good and innovative as Google is. The company has done a lot of hard work to accomplish this feat but still it can be said that there are potentials for any new company to enter into this market and rise high because same was said about Yahoo before the inception of Google.  

 

References

 

Brin, S., & Page, L. (2012). Reprint of: The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual web search engine. Computer Networks, 56(18), 3825-3833.
Edelman, B. and Eisenmann, T. (2010). Google.Inc Abridged.
Gandal, N. (2001). The dynamics of competition on the Internet search engine market. International Journal of Industrial Organization, 19(7), 1103-1117.
Introna, L. D., & Nissenbaum, H. (2000). Shaping the Web: Why the politics of search engines matters. The information society, 16(3), 169-185.
Joachims, T. (2002, July). Optimizing search engines using clickthrough data. In Proceedings of the eighth ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining (pp. 133-142). ACM.
Porter, M. E. (2008). The five competitive forces that shape strategy.

 

 

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