Analysis: 4 Battlefronts for Larry Page's Google

Google became a verb on CEO Eric Schmidt's watch. When he took the helm in 2001, people were doing Internet searches. Ten years later, they're Googling.

But after a decade under the Schmidt regime, Google is more than just another search engine. With 24,000 employees and a pervasive global presence, Google has grown to become one of the most powerful Internet companies in the world. To achieve this status, Google has taken on—and beaten—many enemies: Lycos, AOL, and Yahoo are just a few of the companies that have taken a beating at the hands of the search giant.

But the Internet is a different place than it was ten years ago. As co-founder Larry Page assumes the role of Commander in Chief of Google, he faces a host of new foes, many equipped to go toe-to-toe with the search giant. Here are the four main battlefronts for Page's Google:

1. Web Services
This is Google's home turf, where it's dominated for many years. At the beginning of his tenure, Schmidt fought off a laundry list of search engines to become No. 1. The lion's share of those sites are either now defunct, or operated through Google, Yahoo, or Bing. The most recent numbers from comScore ranked Google as the number one search engine with 66.2 percent of explicit core searches. Even the second and third place search engines trail far behind. Yahoo took just 16.4 percent of the share and Microsoft's Bing had 11.8 percent. Google has maintained this lead for quite a while.

But it shouldn't get complacent. Bing has eaten into its market share by offering services—like social connections in seraches—that Google has been slow to respond to. And while Google's Chrome OS is a direct challenge to companies like Microsoft and Apple and their OS businesses, both companies have strong cloud-service efforts underway. Google's Chrome browser has proved to be a potent weapon on this front, however.

Additionally, Google just launched Places, a location-based service that is a direct competitor to Yelp, as well as Foursquare and Gowalla.

2. Email
When Google introduced Gmail in beta in 2004, it began to take a huge bite out of the email accounts hosted by other companies like Yahoo and Hotmail. Gmail was fully released in July 2009, and by then it already had 146 million monthly users. By comparison Hotmail had 343 million monthly users and Yahoo had 285 million. Gmail is still the third-ranked email provider, but adding features like Google Chat and Voice and offering huge amounts of storage space give it an edge over other providers. As of November, Gmail has 193.3 million monthly users.

But Gmail doesn't lack challenges. In November, Facebook introduced what some interpreted as a challenge to Gmail, a retooled messaging system that combines email, SMS, IM, and other messaging services. However, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg refuted the reports that said the project will "kill" Gmail or any other system.

3. Social Networking

Even though Zuckerberg isn't planning on killing Gmail, it doesn't look like he'll be accepting any friend requests from Page or Schmidt. Tensions between Facebook and Google have been slowly building over the past several months. After Google barred Facebook from its Contacts API, Facebook fired back by posting a loophole around the blockage.

Google has flirted with the concept of social networking, but so far its efforts have been flops. Google shut down Google Wave in August, and Buzz, Google's answer to Twitter, has had its share of privacy issues. Critics have said that Schmidt should have let Buzz die by now. Will Page be able to breathe new life into it, or will he swallow his pride and admit defeat?

A challenge to Facebook, Google Me, has been rumored, but Google hasn't officially confirmed the project. Schmidt has said in the past that his company would incorporate "social information into all of our products," as layers, rather than a standalone service.

"It won't be a social network the way people think of Facebook, but rather social information about who your friends are, people you interact with and we have various ways we'll be collecting that information," he said.

But it's unclear whether Page and Schmidt share the same philosophy on Google's social facets.

4. Mobile
Google's Android has made big waves in the mobile market, and it recently jumped ahead of Apple to become the number two mobile platform in the U.S. But it's a close race. Android leads iOS by just one percentage point. Apple has captured a 25 percent share of the market and Google has 26 percent. BlackBerry still leads the pack with 33.5 percent of the pie, but it's been losing ground to the other two platforms.

This year will prove to be crucial to the escalating mobile platform race. As 4G Android handsets begin to emerge and the iPhone expands its reach to Verizon (and possibly others), Google could come out on top, if it can tame some of the chaos behind its OS.

Will Page's tenure see more companies go the way of MapQuest, one of the many companies all but forgotten because of Google? Page won't assume the Google throne until April. He's been the company's CEO before, but 10 years ago, Google was a small startup, and Page was a twentysomething. Now they've both grown up, and time will tell if the Page regime will bring another decade of success to Google.