Google’s Swings and Misses

The Economist has an article looking at how Lively, Google’s attempt to establish a foothold in the virtual world market, has flopped.

To be fair, it’s far too early to determine whether Lively is a failure given it was only launched last month but it did get me thinking about how some projects rolled out by Google have failed to resonate with the masses. Here are some of the leading candidates:

1. Froogle: the comparison-shopping site has never had much, if any, momentum despite the catchy name. Google eventually renamed its Google Product Search, which is far from inspiring.

2. Orkut: Other than Brazil and India, which respectively account for 53.86% 16.97% of Orkut’s users, the social networking service has not managed to made any inroads against Facebook or MySpace. Even Friendnster seems to have more traction.

3. Google Finance: Launched with much hype in 2006, it lags far behind Yahoo Finance, AOL Finance and MSN Money.

4. Google Blog Search: You would think that Google would dominate this market given it’s the dominant search engine. Yet, blog search remains a place where no one has really grabbed the bull by the horns.

5. GMail: People love it but Yahoo still dominates the Web-based e-mail market while Hotmail remains a strong second.

A disclaimer of sorts: Despite Google’s search dominance, there’s no way for a company to have smash-hits across the board. That’s just unrealistic.

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