Search party: Google's dominance in internet search wanes amid rising app queries and AI threats

Gautam Mehra isn’t on any social media platform. “Google Discover is my equivalent of Instagram’s Explore tab,” he says. Google Discover is a personalised content feed that suggests articles and news based on a user’s interests and search history.

Lately, his Google Discover feed is showing headlines such as: “Google’s dominance of the global search advertising market is being challenged: WARC”; “TikTok comes for Google as it quietly rolls out image search capabilities in TikTok Shop”; and “Gen Z ditches Google, turns to Reddit for product searches”.

Mehra, cofounder of ProfitWheel, an ad analytics platform, isn’t surprised. Until a year ago, Google was the go-to place for 100% of his searches. “Now, it’s about 40%,” he says. For the rest, he goes to platforms like Amazon for product searches, Reddit for unique problems, food and grocery apps, and ChatGPT.


After reigning as the undisputed king of internet search for two decades, Google’s dominance has been diminishing in the past threefour years. Specialised platforms like Amazon for product search, Spotify/Apple Music for music, Roblox for gaming, Booking.com for travel, and social media apps like TikTok, Instagram and Reddit are gaining ground.

According to a March 2023 report by PowerReviews, a ratings enhancement consultancy, 50% of US consumers, mainly millennials, start product searches on Amazon rather than Google. Also, 5% of Gen Z users in US are likely to begin their shopping journey on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram.


Over the past seven years, the contribution of search to Google’s overall ad revenue has been fluctuating. It fell from 73.97% in 2017 to 70.8% in 2020. There was a slight bump to 73.6% in 2023, but it was still below the 2017 level. In April 2023, a WARC report forecasted that Google’s share in the global search advertising market would drop from 51% in 2021 to 50.4% in 2023.


HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?
In essence, these days you turn to Google only when you are unsure where to look for something. For everything else, you head to specialised platforms, which Himanshu Khanna calls “mindshare platforms”. Khanna is the founder of Openvy.com, an online community platform. He notes that Google acknowledges losing some search market share to platforms that dominate user attention for specific activities.

“Users visit IMDb or Rotten Tomatoes for movie reviews and ratings. Consequently, Google now prioritises displaying these results prominently at the top of its search pages,” he says. Last week, some X users shared that Google is now showing Instagram posts within its Perspectives feature in the Search results.


However, these “mindshare platforms” are trying to outperform Google’s search capabilities. Today, when it comes to finding where to watch something, Google is often the go-to choice. Khanna says IMDb has started displaying this information. “It now provides details on where a show or a movie is available in your country,” he says. Mehra, who has been following Google’s search story from the beginning, recalls the changes that have happened over the decades.

Archie was the first internet search engine. Created by Alan Emtage in 1990, it would index information in the form of large files on the web. By 1994, Yahoo!, WebCrawler and Lycos expanded the search landscape. Google officially launched in 1998. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin introduced PageRank algorithm to Google’s web search. It ranked web pages based on multiple factors and displayed search results accordingly. “It revolutionised modern-day internet search,” says Mehra, recalling his days navigating the web on a dial-up connection, all the while hoping no one would pick up the landline and interrupt his net surfing. In 2007, Google introduced Unified Search.


“From 10 blue links, you started seeing images, news and videos as part of search results.” Two years later, Microsoft launched rival Bing but it remained a small player.

The early 2010s saw the rise of mobile- and voice-based queries. Voice assistants such as Siri and Alexa emerged as did image-led search. Since 2020, search has evolved towards personalised, AI-driven experiences.

Soon, search engines will be replaced by search assistants, says Aditya Agrawal, founder of superU, an ad network for the AI world. He cites a Gartner report that predicts that “traditional search engine volume will drop 25% by 2026, with search marketing losing market share to AI chatbots and other virtual agents”.

This shift is under way. Last week, Amazon Beauty launched a personalised recommendations tool called SkinCare Advisor. Agrawal is developing search assistants that trawl the net for data, especially in sectors like healthcare.


WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR GOOGLE?
Mehra says that while Google’s search influence may be waning slightly, it still gathers abundant user behaviour data from Gmail and invoices from ecommerce transactions and travel itineraries. “YouTube, Android and Chrome are all mammoths of data signals for ‘signed-in’ data,” he adds. Further, Google’s Pixel has introduced AI-powered features, like “Circle to Search” what’s on your screen without switching apps. “I’m not selling my Google shares anytime soon,” says Mehra, who has recently launched consumr.ai, an AI-led consumer intelligence platform.

In an email, a Google spokesperson tells ET: “Over the past 25 years, we’ve continued to reimagine and expand what Google Search can do. Years ago, it might have seemed like science fiction to pull out a phone, take a picture of a broken bike part and ask, ‘How do I fix this?’ Today, you can use Google Lens, find out what’s broken, where to pick up a replacement part and how to repair it yourself, all in a matter of seconds.” The spokesperson also mentions “Multisearch” (where people can search naturally using pictures and text for things that are hard to describe) and “Circle to Search” as examples of the company’s advancements in search in recent years.


Significantly, Google’s rival search interfaces have fallen short. Vikrama Dhiman, SVP of product at an on-demand tech conglomerate, says the infinite scroll feature on platforms like Instagram and TikTok negatively affects search functionality. “These platforms excel at keeping you scrolling with strong recommendations, but their limitations become clear when you ask a direct question,” he says. For example, while Instagram offers a variety of recommended audio options for Stories and posts, searching for a specific place or piece of music on the app is still a hassle, says Dhiman.


IMPACT ON PEOPLE
How has the evolution of online search impacted end consumers? “People expect platforms to know the context of their search now. They want the search process to reduce the cognitive load of decisionmaking in as many aspects of their life as they can,” says Agrawal of superU.

So platforms are now trying to eliminate our need to search. Food and grocery delivery apps highlight your most-visited restaurants, favourite dishes and previously bought grocery items at the top of the home page.

“This has been done to reduce the decision-making time on these apps,” says Riti Malhotra, director of product at a hyperlocal delivery firm. She recalls an inside joke from her stint at a food delivery startup: it takes longer to decide what to order than it does to deliver it. However, personalised search results have some limitations. “Even if an item is rarely bought or low-ranked, if you bought it last, it will appear at the top for you, marked as previously bought, until the model learns that this is not what the user wants anymore.”

At some level, these recommendation engines make you accustomed to letting a machine take decisions for you. Agrawal admits that he now decides what food to order only 5-10% of the time. The rest of the time, he relies on his app’s recommendations. What are we doing with all the time saved by not making these low-stakes decisions?

“Maybe we watch Instagram Reels,” he quips. There are concerns about social media-driven search. “Grocery or food recommendations are based on what the algorithm knows about you, so it doesn’t force changes in your choices,” says Gayatri Sapru, anthropologist and founder of brand consultancy Folk Frequency. But platforms like Instagram that don’t have search capabilities built into them are being used for search intuitively, she adds. “It doesn’t always have what you need, so it points you to the closest thing it has on offer, thus redirecting your attention and restricting your world view.”


Sapru cites American sociologist and MIT professor Sherry Turkle to strengthen her argument. “Turkle wrote about how the very presence on a screen of multiple windows requires you to assimilate different information and parts of yourself so the sources are diverse and you can see that your identity is a tapestry of ideas from multiple points of view. This critical skill is lost when you are living, liking, scrolling within apps that create a world of their own,” says Sapru. “It is hampering basic research skills in the younger generations.”

At a broader level, AI’s tendency to prioritise quantifiable results can overshadow more esoteric or indigenous ideas, warns Sapru. “Over time, AI might create a world where the latter ideas disappear entirely from search results, which is alarming.”

Now, more than ever, end consumers need to provide feedback to these apps for improvement, says Roopa Rao, a product management professional with search deployment experience dating back to the days of Boolean search, which involved using phrases like “And”, “Or”, and “Not” to refine search results. “Tools like ChatGPT constantly ask if their responses are helpful.

Without feedback, AI assumes this is what you want,” she explains. Mehra, too, believes that while platforms continue to evolve their search capabilities, individuals also need to reflect on how their search habits have changed over time and how they feel about these changes. “The less I search,” he says about himself, “the less I think.”