Google days "over and done with"

[Alpine]

MARKETING SEARCH guru Mike Grehan said at a Netimperative dinner last night that it was inevitable that Google would turn into a portal.

He suggested that Google had run its course, and the third generation of search would cause changes in the market.

Despite Google's clean interface, all you need to do is to click on the "more" button and it begins to look like a portal anyway, Grehan said.

Grehan took as his theme "the future of search", and suggested that search features would have to evolve further.

He said: "The end user is a nitwit and doesn't know what he's looking for." Someone might do a search for Harley Davidson and find some guy in some US state who had little to do with motorbikes.

"It would be nice if the end user was more sophisticated," he said. However, he said, more search results gave information because technology in the engines tried to solve the problem for users by parsing phrases entered.

He said that 98 per cent of Google's revenues come from pay to click, compared to 68 per cent of Yahoo's revenues. "The Google years are over and done with," he said. And he said that Adsense for publishers "is a nonsense". It's not ad sensitive and produced flawed results, he claimed. The introduction of pay per click gave the Internet its second wind, but, he said: "I think click fraud is huge." Pagerankings weren't important, said Grehan. What is important is the group or community that coalesces around a site. He said: "In the third generation of search you can't fool people any more."

The INQuirer