When it comes to search, Google is a monopoly. That’s the ruling from a US federal judge who called Google a “monopolist.” It’s not an opinion shared by all, but the weight of this decision could come crashing down on Google and its position as the world’s most widely-used search engine.
I’ve long argued that Google achieved this dominant search engine position by being not just a good Internet wayfinder, but by being the best. GenZ may not remember a time before you “Googled” something, but some of us were there at the dawn of the World Wide Web, a network that grew so fast and wide that it quickly became unknowable. Web Search was a critical and, for a time, a varied industry. Google wasn’t even there at the start. Yahoo, Lycos, Alta Vista, and Northern Light (really felt like a canny lighthouse reference) all predated Google, which arrived in 1999.
Where early search focused on pure indexing and some unscalable browse-tree stratagems, Google, from day one, was algorithmic. Sure, it spidered and indexed, but it also weighted for relevancy. The story of how Google came to dominate is almost obvious and well-known. The question that this ruling appears to answer is how, after winning the battle, Google maintained control.
Race for the top
No market, especially those in technology, is written in stone. Players come and go. New ideas arrive, and sometimes they stick. Sometimes, they grow while others fall. Competition can feel like a zero-sum game because there are almost always winners and losers. In the smartphone space, the once-dominant Nokia and Blackberry had no answer for the innovative iPhone and lost that battle – badly.
Search was like that at the start, where even the once-vaunted Yahoo stumbled and fell before Google. This is not to say that there is no competition. In every market where there is a dominant player, smaller and perhaps more eager ones are trying to chip away at that market position. Sometimes, they can do it with innovation and maybe a bit of luck. Other times, they meet an invisible yet powerful market force that almost prevents them from participating in the race for the top.
When Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007, there wasn’t even an App Store, but the device did arrive with a few baked-in apps, including YouTube and Maps., both powered by Google. There was also the Web browser Safari and even before Apple’s first phone, the company was using Google as the default search engine in the Safari browser on the desktop.
The price of domination
That relationship has continued not because Apple and Google are friends. Apple eventually replaced Google’s mapping system with one of its own. No, Apple sets Google as Safari’s default search engine because Google pays Apple billions a year for the privilege. In 2022, it was a reported $20B.
This is no small thing. There are currently over 1.3B iPhones in use. Most of the remaining smartphone market is Android, which usually defaults to Chrome as the browser and Google as the search engine.
At least 95% of people use a mobile device to browse and search the web. On the iPhone and in Android (Chrome), you can use a different search engine like DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, or Bing, but those choices are hidden under settings and, to be honest, if it just works why would you? I’m not implying that these other search engines aren’t good. DuckDuckGo is often touted for protecting your privacy better than others (looking mostly at Google), and Bing has vastly improved from its early days and led the way in generative AI search results. However, even with its AI overviews at the top of too many search results, Google’s basic search results remain unmatched in quality.
This level of default control has made it nearly impossible for Microsoft (Bing) or DuckDuckGo to compete at scale. The default is the winner – by default. Having all that access also means that Google gets to serve you all those ads that appear at the top of many search results. Google’s search ads position was not ruled as a monopoly, but it’s hard to argue that the search engine control doesn’t in some way strengthen its ad-serving position.
Google, ‘Monopoly’
Google currently has 91% worldwide search engine market share. If you’re splitting hairs, that’s 9% short of a monopoly, but it’s close enough. I guess the question is, did Google come by that dominance fairly? I think it did. Has it held onto it fairly? I don’t know, but I will say that Google’s ubiquity has had the unfortunate knock-on effect of Google essentially defining the Web experience not only for people who search but for anyone who visits any website, destinations built from foundation to the headlines you read to be seen and displayed by Google Search. No one does Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for DuckDuckGo or Yahoo. It’s all about Google, and I often wonder why it’s not called “Google Engine Optimization” or GEO.
Google will appeal but the pressure will now mount for Google to make changes, possibly divest the search business from the Alphabet parent company. Google could even stop paying Apple, and Apple might think it’s finally time to get going on its own long-rumored search engine. Now might also turn out to be the perfect time for SearchGPT.
At the very least, you might soon see a change when you set up your next best iPhone or best Android. Perhaps the device will finally ask you to choose a search engine.
Naturally, you’ll still choose Google. I mean, who wouldn’t?