I first heard of Google in the late 90’s from The Scout Report, an academic mailing list reviewing all that is new in the world of research. Google was their favorite web search engine. Since then I have become part of what I can only call the Google Generation. And it was a generational phenomenon. A whole generation of web surfers that learnt to go without thinking to Google to find, well, whatever.

Last week I was at an Apple iPhone event in London and chatted to a developer who made a sailing application for the iPhone that, as one of its functions, tells you the tides anywhere in the world. Then a thought struck me - here is an application I would use just for going on a day out to the beach. Open it, see when the tide is low or high, and time my trip for low tide. More than that, here is an application that gives me the information I want immediately that would normally take several minutes of fumbling through Google and poorly organised web sites. And this is only one example out of tens of thousands of possible applications that I can find to make my life that little bit easier. Bit, by bit, I am turning from a Google searcher to an iPhone App user. Already I have stopped searching Google for restaurants, films, directions, tides, weather, etc.

What I think we are witnessing now is a new generational change. There is an explosion of iPhone app creation and usage (100,000 apps, 1 billion downloads and growing), much like the explosion of users that Google experienced. And on top of that, it is coming with a rock-solid business model and without the irritation of adverts. Now a whole new generation of internet users, including me, are looking more to Apple’s App Store for information than to Google. I’ll call us the “There’s an App For That” generation.

Google cannot control the data they index and the web sites have little or no financial incentive to improve the presentation of that data. On the other hand App writers get paid directly by each user. The result? More and better applications presenting information that is already available on the web and thousands, maybe millions, of user willing and able to pay a dollar for that App. In short the Apps are getting better and the web sites remain just as poor. It is gradually getting easier for me to buy an application that gives me the information I want than searching Google.

For the future it means that web search and especially advertising sponsored web search will become irrelevant and Apple’s iPhone and App Store will become Google’s main competitor. Or maybe Apple will be the disruptive change that will push Google into the sidelines in the same way that Google pushed Yahoo! out of its way.

Most opinions I have read about why Google spent millions on its mobile OS, Android, only to give it away are around getting mobile advertising dollars to keep flowing to Google. I disagree. The mobile market is changing and it is moving away from web sites that get paid for by advertising. And the mobile App market is beginning to eat into the web search market. I believe this is a fight for survival. Browsers and publishers now have a way to pay and charge for information directly. Advertisers now have to change their relationship from the huge company that pushes the adverts onto the web to the small companies that publish the data. I do not see a place in there where Google would fit easily.