Google's dominance 'will not last forever'

Google will not always be the dominant point of access

Google is now the default interface for the web but will not always be the dominant point of access, according to an industry expert. 

John Batelle, one of the founders of Wired Magazine, said at HP's Print 2.0 conference in New York: "The web has an interface and I would argue that it is Google right now." 

"Search is that interface but it is not always going to be, just like it was not always DOS and it is not always going to be Windows."

Batelle compared Google's sparse homepage to the command line from DOS that was used to get information from a computer.

"Where are we now in search? Well, the command line, but with a huge difference: we are not talking in the computer's language, we are talking in our language," he said.

Batelle, who now runs web marketing firm Federated Media, said that the way search treats its users would eventually have wide-reaching effects for all websites. 

"Think about what search does. You come to a place (Google, MSN, Yahoo, whatever), you say something and the whole place reorganises around what you just said," he explained.

"And this is an interface that we are getting so used to that we are going to start getting mad at businesses that do not do that for us."