Butterfly effect: Of small tweaks and big bangs

What is the connection between a Physics law and an online company? Plenty.
Let’s first dig into the butterfly effect, the theory for which goes like this: The wing movements of a butterfly, can cause certain tiny changes in the environment around it. These tiny changes can then multiply and be the cause of an entire storm.

Interesting. And here’s what Google has got to do with it: About a year back, Google started to show real time flight status updates in the search results itself. So, if you typed in British Airways 1405, you got a snippet below saying whether it was on schedule or not, and what was the ETD or ETA. As a frequent flyer and avid Google user, I was elated. I didn’t need to go anywhere, just plop in my flight and I was good to go.

This tiny change however, actually created a huge stir in the online aviation vertical. Flight status queries were one of the major sources of traffic to OTAs, travel search engines and airline websites. They not only created special pages for these and search-engine optimised them, but also spent money bidding on these keywords in order to generate the traffic needed.

When Google started the flight status update within its search engine, fewer people went to their websites. You guessed right. Less traffic = less sales = less revenue. The exact loss in traffic was as high as 17% in some cases.

Now, Google is set to do that all over again. It’s quietly introduced a number of such “features” into its SERPs, of the pages that display the search results.

Sometime back, Google launched Google Movies in select countries (without any fanfare). You simply type in the name of the movie and Google will immediately give you the names of theatres close to you where it was being screened, along with the show timings.

One more click and you can read user reviews. Again, show timings and user reviews are one of the primary traffic sources to a huge number of entertainment portals.
What’s more, the Google box also converts currencies, gives weather details, tracks your fedex shipment or even simply calculates “4*7+(3^2)?”

It’s got me thinking. Will Google silently slay a whole slew of business models?
Google, more than anybody else, knows that social is the way to go. So much so, that they have a new feature called “SearchWiki”.

Those of you who use Gmail or iGoogle would normally be “signed in” and would notice two small boxes that have started to appear in the search results. The purpose of SearchWiki is two-fold. First, it adds the social dimensions of “thumbs up” and “reviews”. Secondly, it is meant to take personalised search to a whole new level.  All this reminds me of a Harvard podcast that I recently heard, wherein Roger Martin speaks that the competition in the new age is not industry specific. Companies will compete with every other company for everything. I know one thing for sure, Google is already doing this and how!
Mehra is business head - search and affiliate, Ignitee.