Will Competing Search Engines Fracture the Internet Permanently?

A few notable things happened since the beginning of August that I’m pondering — because I think they’re all signs of the future of search:

1. OpenAI launched SearchGPT, which resulted in the New York Times, Wired, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and GQ blocking OAI-SearchBot, the crawling bot for SearchGPT. (See their robots.txt file for more.)
2. D____d T___p declared war on Google, saying it's “very bad” and that it might be “shut down.”
3. Most significant: Google was declared “a monopolist” by a federal judge, with news shortly following that Google may be broken up.

At first thought, you might think that these are three entirely different news stories, right? Other than involving search engines, what do these all have in common??

To best answer this, let’s go back in time and look at two examples that I think show a precedent for what could be happening: social media platforms and streaming services.?

The Rise and Fall of Unified Social Media

In 2003 and 2004, two social media platforms launched that shaped the way social media still functions today: Myspace in 2003 and Facebook in 2004. Until 2006, Facebook was only for college students (with a college email address). 2006 is also when Myspace was the number one visited website in the United States, above Google. Since that point, Myspace has steadily declined in usage while Facebook Inc. has turned into a conglomerate that renamed itself Meta (while Facebook the platform continued to be Facebook), becoming the center of various controversies and conducting a slew of acquisitions.?

So what does this have to do with search engines?

A study by Savanta shows that while Facebook may hold strong with millennials and older, Gen Z users are more inclined to use other platforms and have more favorable opinions of other platforms. Yes, one of those other platforms is Instagram (owned by Meta), but it also includes TikTok.

Meanwhile, there’s LinkedIn (where you're reading this, because I only published this here), Snapchat, Twitter — and then the smaller, niche ones like serving specific audiences. Stuff like Telegram, Signal, and even Truth Social. The website Buffer lists 23 different social media platforms for your brand to consider using.

23 different social media sites! But why? How could there be that many options??

The reality is that — and I don’t need to go into all the details, because there are many other studies that cover this better — different demographics are using social media platforms in different ways. And people are using social media platforms for different purposes. When one considers LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok, you can argue that these disparate social media platforms are used to reflect different aspects of their personality.?

Now, what do streaming platforms have to do with this?

Remember Netflix?

Okay, we all remember Netflix. But do you remember that time when Netflix was the only kid on the block. Then along came Hulu, followed by all the other options we have today (HBO Go > HBO Max > Max, Prime, Apple, Disney, Paramount, Peacock, Shudder, etc.) Somewhere in there, YouTube went from exclusively user-generated content to a full-blown television streaming service as well.

Do you know anyone who uses every single one of those streaming services? And is there anything in there that even resembles a monopoly on streaming??

What does this mean for search engines?

Consider the decisions people will start making, whether intentional or not

Unlike social media and streaming platforms, it’s currently hard to imagine a world where people use multiple search engines to get through the day.

But my predictions are that:

1. People will start to choose the search engine (or, more accurately, search experience ) that best matches their worldview and is tailored to them, in the same style that people fall into using the social media that is best aligned with their point of view.?
2. People will go deeper on using search experiences for the content they’re seeking. In the same style a person might use Netflix for reality shows and YouTube for UGC and Disney for superhero shows, people will be using one search experience for recipes, another for how-to, and a third for information on brands.?
3. News in particular will be one of the most affected areas: which search engine will someone trust to serve the news they are looking for, in the same way that Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Truth Social will serve different narratives around the same news story??
4. Some search experiences will be more trusted for product facts while others will be more trusted for reviews.?

In short, people might find themselves using various search engines or search experiences throughout the day, while eschewing some entirely.?

Why do I say this threatens to fracture the internet entirely? We could easily end up in a world where people have entirely different search experiences to learn (or confirm) information, aligning themselves to platforms based on who they are and what they want to hear. If members of one political party prefer Google while members of another political party abandon it, that could prompt a major shift in search engine usage, at least within the United States.?

Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

I don’t know. Neither. Both. I’ve felt that Google has too much power for a long time. But a world where people are even more divided based on the information they find via search is a concerning concept as well.?