The Connections Project

Google

Facebook is one of the few websites which threatens Google. It's perhaps the *only* site which can compete against Google in terms of sheer traffic, and what's more, Facebook contracted with Google's arch rival, Bing, for its own search functionality.

Functionally the two websites are completely different. One focuses on searching the entire internet while the other is a social network. Google has, however, taken some early steps into social networking territory with its Google Buzz project.

Yahoo is a rival search engine and one of Google's top enemies, although the two have dabbled with partnerships in the past. Google used its clout to thwart a partnership between Yahoo and Bing, and there's a possibility this could lead to anti-trust actions against Google.

Yahoo was actually competitive long before Google entered the scene, but Google's mathematically sophisticated search algorithms quickly gave Google the upper hand.

Besides algorithmic differences under the hood, a key difference between Google and Yahoo is that Google goes for simplicity, whereas Yahoo clutters its pages with tons and tons of advertisements and spam.

YouTube is owned by Google. Google bought the website for considerably more than most analysts valued it at. Videos from YouTube are integrated directly into Google's flagship search engine, where they often enjoy positions near the top of the search results page. YouTube is the source of some of Google's biggest legal woes, as old-fashioned media conglomerates desperately try to cling to a bygone, pre-YouTube world.

While Google proper is a search engine which focuses on searching the entire internet, YouTube provides a specialty search engine of its own which searches its own video archives, which do constitute a large majority of all the video content of the internet.

Wikipedia provides such a wealth of valuable content, much of which has absolutely no rival online, that Wikipedia pages routinely dominate Google search results. The websites are a pretty close example of a perfect symbiotic relationship, with Google steering traffic toward the encyclopedia giant and acting as a sophisticated search index on it, while the encyclopedia in turn gives Google great content to feed its searchers.

Functionally the two sites are quite different, as Google focuses on searching and indexing other parties' content rather than providing its own.

Blogger is one of many products which Google bought up once it established itself as a mover-and-shaker on the internet. Blogger is one of the major hubs of blogging, and Google gets a crucial advantage by having direct access to all that data, which the other search engines must painstakingly crawl like any other content. In recent years Google has been pushing to integrate its adsense programs more and more into Blogger. Blogger provides Google with tons and tons of high quality content to fill its search engine results pages, and in turn Google steers fresh readership to those blogs. In fact with the adsense program, Google basically finances a lot of the blogs on Blogger.

Twitter is disruptively innovative to Google and to web search in general: with Twitter came the concept of real time search, which Google is still struggling to perfect. Being the king of realtime, Twitter is the first website to establish and maintain foothold in a technology which really has a nontrivial chance of revolutionizing how we search for information. (Other websites, like YouTube, had this chance, but Google bought them all up.)