Who will disrupt Google's Search Business?
Ever since surpassing Yahoo as the choice for internet search, Google has never looked back. Though Microsoft and Yahoo have spent significant money and effort, Google has emerged as the standard for search. Google has not only become the leader of search, search has become google now. Does the below trends suggest changes to the underlying business model for internet search?
Mobile Adoption
eMarketer predicts, Mobile ads will surpass Desktop ads in US digital ad spending in 2016 and the slump for desktop ads will continue. In 2015 May Google announced more google searches take place on mobile devices compared to desktops in ten countries including USA and Japan. Unlike desktops where users rely on browsers, mobile usage is more based on individual apps. Facebook with 127 million unique users is the leading mobile app ahead of YouTube’s 97 million unique users.
Internet Data Consolidation
Google's core competency lies in understanding searches and in producing relevant results fast. This is achieved by technological excellence in various areas including language processing, spell corrections, web crawling, indexing and page ranking combined with friendly user experience with relevant ads. Will some of these competencies become irrelevant when data is concentrated at few sites?
Recent trends in internet shows increasing monopoly in web content. Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and YouTube have become the choices for certain types of content. Facebook has strengthened its position in app market share with the acquisition of Whatsapp. Wikipedia and Twitter are other leading internet sites. Users more or less know where to look for certain content.
Users are moving away from Google search to Amazon to research about consumer products. According to 2015 Bloomreach survey, 44% or the consumers start product searches in Amazon compared to 34% who rely on search engines. In future, these large content providers may have a better bargain power on the data they hold.
Privacy Concerns and Alternatives
Though small in numbers there are people who are concerned about Google's privacy policies. Popularity of DuckDuckGo, which handles about 11 million searches a day, asserts this argument. DuckDuckGo claims similar experience to Google without privacy concerns. Prevalence of search technologies is also evident from the competition in Enterprise Search business.
Do these trends indicate potential disruption in search business? Or will we see Google expanding its own wings in the changing environment?
Tech Research/Software Development/Security Consultant
8 年Leo, just wondering about your rewrite of Internet Search history, when Google started becoming a big deal was when they surpassed AltaVista as the search engine of choice. Yahoo was king of the "portals", where you found things through curated lists.
Making a Difference For a Difference
8 年I believe it is the regulators that are having a tough time in keeping up which is why a lot of the questions tend to skim along the lines of what is best for the consumer and company but in actual fact, there is not clear line stipulated yet. Google is definitely prepare to push the frontier of what is best for the consumer and that includes communities.
Software Architect & Engineering Lead. Creator of Sharism, Researcher of Artificial Conscious Intelligence(ACI)
8 年Google will keep a lock-in advantage for a long time, unless the machine learning assistant can really breakthrough to learn personal taste and help create personal archive, the same time resonating external archives coherently. Of course, Google would do it as well, if not in sleeping.
Specialist-1 Software Engineering @ UST
8 年I believe Google will innovate more extensions like they have done in the past lime Maps, weather updates, event calendars, commutation info and so on, which will ensure people are still tied to Google.