What Do Search Engines Do?

They provide the most relevant results as fast as possible.

On the user’s end:

The search engine user identifies a need.

Formats a question. Generally, 58% of searches are 1-3 words.

Hits enter and performs a search.

At least, that's what we've all grown accustomed to.

What if that wasn't the reality, at least not for the most widely used search engine?

What if the most popular search engine was not only open to manipulation by internal team members, political parties, and also - actively degrading user experience to increase ad revenue…

Turns out - This just might be our reality.

Market Share by Force

It's beyond clear that Google is the dominant force in search engines.

There are many competitors, but they all have difficulty breaking into the market globally.

In China, we've got Baidu.

In Russia, Yandex is more popular than Google.

Outside of those regionally popular search engines, Google reigns supreme.

Some of us remember when they were the clear winner and obviously producing the best product... Search results.

Now, it's hard to believe that the results shown are the best they can do, especially considering Alphabet's size and scale.

That's +$70b per quarter.

With that, they've got plenty of money to keep the top spot. They buy market share by securing the device market.

We're talking $10s of billions a year just for the default search engine on devices and within browsers. They tend to refer to these relationships as 'profit sharing' or 'traffic acquisition' models.

And they don't stop there. They have the same setup Samsung as well.

From what's known, they don't pay anywhere near the same amount, but it's still +$3b a year, which is no joke.

You might be asking… how does Google make all of this money to support this type of bold market share acquisition practice?

It's all about the ads.

So, let's recap.

• Search engines' main goal is to provide the best answer to a user's question as quickly as possible.

• Google is known to be the best at doing that

• Google pays +30b a year for direct access to search users on mobile devices.

• Google has manipulated results to align with its internal political idealogy.

• Google actively obscures its practices and lies openly to users about how it functions.

And when an Ads VP requests the Chrome team (and potentially the search team) to manipulate the search results via:

• Injecting queries

• Manipulate rankings

All to improve ad revenue so that they can hit their goals… what are we supposed to think?

We should all default to the assumption Google holds true to their "Don't be evil" motto, and nothing happened in 2019 to the detriment of both the search experience and the ad model that fleeced advertisers.

And, certainly, none of this is still going on in a period of time where Google is making 80% of its revenue off of these Ads.

Conclusion:

The reality is this: Google can do whatever it wants as long as it continues to obscure reality, and Government officials can't pin them down with any wrongdoing or on legitimate Monopoly infractions.

To be honest, as a user, I move between Duck Duck Go and Google Search depending on the topic or need.

I'm sure we've all seen it. There are topics where Google just isn't cutting it. To me, that's odd.

Quality is slipping, and they are enslaved to the need to continuously grow, even if it means burning down the product that made them number 1.

Until next time - Join me as I build - Beyond the Dashboard and share what's on my mind.

-Matt

PS: I am still over here building the content generation habit and finding the proper cadence for getting these shipped weekly. One day, I’ll find something that works.

Cool Cars:

a Premo ‘05 GT3. 51,000 miles with the Porsche Authenticity cert and finished in Arctic Silver Metallic. What an absolute beauty from Iowa.

I’ve been looking at potential starters… it’s honestly kind of depressing to see what the market rate is for a shell. WE’ve got this thing… an absolute monster already at ~$4k. Unreal.

Another seriously painful example. From Dodi in Monterey, CA. It looks like it’s been completely stripped down. All for the low, low price of $12,500.

Both of these are no engine examples and were obviously part donors in a past life. What a world.