87% of all searches are Google.
7% are Bing
2.7% are Yahoo
.5% are Baidu
Google for 15 years has held over 80% of the search market and gone pretty much unchallenged.
Alphabet “Googles parent company” made 182 billion in 2020.
104 billion of that came directly off Google search.
And second place isn’t a bad place either.
Bing made 7.7 billion dollars for Microsoft in 2020.
Which is a good return, seeing how it launched in 2009 and it’s main marketing year was 2011, with over 100 million spent promoting it.
The big question is why with two extremely popular search engines that are profitable, really only two big companies are doing it?
Looked at that and the first thing to explore is the startup level.
Not a ton of competitors to search in the last decade happened, but easily the biggest bust was Quixey.
Quixey raised 165 million dollars on the idea of being Google, but for apps.
It launched in 2009, not long after the birth of apps and kept bringing in VC money on this idea.
Issue was this idea of a google competitor really was a solution for a problem that didn’t exist.
89% of phones have 18-40 apps in them.
Very few people have 100+ apps and most apps are things they didn’t need any search for such as Instagram, Uber, TikTok or well, Google.
Comparing that, Google averages 3.5 searches every single day from users.
Quixey had an idea that app searches would be as important as web searches, but got the market wrong.
After that, some smaller companies have popped up and went one of two ways.
Premium search-Paying monthly for specialty niche searches.
Anonymous-Searches that are 100% encrypted.
Both have some companies doing okay, but no one close to a billion dollars.
Next group to look at are the mid level tech companies.
Intuit
Dell
IBM
Groups that are really big companies, but not the top five groups in tech.
The reason I don’t think any of them enter into search is Bing.
Bing was a billion dollar plus investment for a 7% market stake and a large chunk of that is due to Microsoft having Bing as the default on a lot of products.
A company like Intuit could probably make a really great competitor, but it’d be really expensive, be tough to brand and likely flop.
It’s just too big of a risk.
After that, why aren’t more mega tech companies competing with Google?
If Microsoft can make 7b a year off of it, why not Apple, Facebook or Amazon?
Really simple.
Apple
Apple is paid by Google to be the default search engine on iPhones/Apple products and was paid 15 billion in 2020 to do it.
If Apple wanted to do their own competitor, it’d cost them a ton of money, likely confuse Apple users that like google and a decent chunk would likely just use google anyway.
Apple entering search is just spending money to lose 15 billion a year and get no clear reward.
Google tried copying Facebook nearly a decade ago with Google+ that bombed and I feel Facebook has avoided search purely due to that lesson.
Big reason I feel is the gap in the products Facebook is known for, being Instagram & Facebook.
They are social products, where the market idea is people see them.
Just a quick sample of things which are in the top 100 most searched things on Google.
- Divorce lawyers
- How to cheat on my wife
- Nearest abortion doctors
- Bankruptcy lawyers
- Massive amounts of porn searches
Search isn’t meant to be social and should feel private.
Facebook’s branding I don’t see connecting with that and I think most people would attach it with social, even if a totally different product.
Amazon
Amazon sort of is a Google competitor, with Alexa being a voice search engine.
The entire reason I don’t think they go after Google is just two parts.
- Why enter a tough market when there’s a lot of other work running Amazon, AWS, Whole Foods, Twitch, Alexa, firestick and more?
- Why make Google angry, when organic searches from them alone are one of the biggest points of sale?
And that’s why I don’t really see Google getting a big challenge anytime soon.
Competing is too expensive for startups or mid level companies.
The big companies also don’t have a reason or it may be poorer branded.
And end of the day, Google is a really good product.
It takes literal seconds to find what people want, is free and compared to Facebook, Instagram and other products, I don’t notice the ads.