Could Google’s Search Dominance Be in Danger?

It has been several decades since Google established itself as the single most dominant entity in the search engine space. Their influence is so widespread that the name of the company has become a broadly accepted shorthand for the act of searching something online itself. This level of ubiquity has resulted in Google holding onto the industry with a vice grip with all things having been considered and taken into account.

The search engine juggernaut owns an 84.66% share of the desktop search engine market. Meanwhile, its grip on mobile search is even stronger, with a whopping 96.45% share of the overall sector. Pretty much no other search engine can hold a candle to Google in the mobile search engine space, although Bing has done a decent job of acting as an alternative to Google on desktop by snapping up an 8.87% share of the desktop search market. Overall, Google holds 92.9% market share of search engine industry, while Microsoft Bing stands at 3.03%

With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that Google receives a large majority of the total revenues from online searches as well. It currently receives 58% of the revenue from this sector as of 2022.

Coming in second is Baidu with 15%, Amazon with 14%, Bing with 6% and Yahoo with just 2%. Various other search engines and online platforms end up comprising 5% of the total revenue that is received by this particular sector.

With global search ad revenues predicted to surpass $400 billion by 2026, the competition for entry into this space has started to heat up. Google has managed to hold fast in the face of countless attacks from various other companies, but in spite of the fact that this is the case a new player might have emerged that could pose perhaps the first true threat that Google since the early 2000s.

This player is Chat GPT, and it has already gotten Google pretty nervous since it can make them somewhat less relevant than might have been the case otherwise. Microsoft has already invested quite a bit of cash into Chat GPT, and the tech company has also mentioned that it will be incorporating the AI chatbot into its own Bing search engine starting from March.

More specifically, Microsoft plans to use a new generation of OpenAI models that would be even more superior to Chat GPT. This could give Google a real run for its money, since users will obviously go to the search engine that allows them to get the best possible experience.

Up until this point, search engines like Bing have struggled to set themselves apart from Google and establish a usage case that justifies people trying them out when something superior already exists in the form of Google search.

One might think that Google is too big to fail, but it wouldn’t be the first time that a dominant company ends up losing its market share because it failed to keep up with the times. Nokia used to be the single most powerful mobile phone company in the world, but these days you never even hear about it because the company was not able to hop onto the smartphone bandwagon fast enough.

Google relies on its search engine the way that Apple relies on the iPhone, and it will be interesting to see how the company manages to weather these storms. They have attempted to create an answer to Chat GPT with Bard, but these efforts have not borne any real fruit yet. Only time will tell whether or not Google is able to provide something that will keep users visiting its search engine. The way things are looking right now, Google has clearly been blindsided and it will take a lot of effort for the company to regain some lost ground.

Read next: Battle Between Google And ChatGPT Heats Up As Search Engine Labeled ‘Lethargic Search Monopoly’
by Zia Muhammad via Digital Information World