Facts No One Will Ever Tell You About Search Engines.
Technology has become a core part of our day-to-day existence; with the likes of Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google leading in the various technological spaces. My only concern has been the kind of monopoly some of these tech giants have enjoyed for a long time.
I became even more alarmed when the world came to a standstill upon Google’s infrastructure going down for an hour in 2020. That should tell us the extent to which the world is dependent on these technology services.
This write-up will focus on the search engine market and throw out a question for your feedback.
First of all let’s ask ourselves this question: what are the common search engines out there apart from Google? We have Bing, Ask, Yahoo, Baidu, Yandex, DuckDuckGo, Naver, AOL etc. Some of these you have never heard of.
From Statistics (https://netmarketshare.com/search-engine-market-share.aspx) Google holds more than 69 percent of the search engine market share. According to internetlivestats.com, as at 2019, Google’s search engine was processing over 3.5 billion search queries in a day. From this you can conclude that none of these competitors in the search engine market comes any close to Google.
There have been rumours of Apple developing a default search engine for its iPhones amid Google’s antitrust woes. Will this search engine ever be able to compete with Google or will it suffer the same fate as the others? Only time will tell.
Google says its source of income for servicing the cost of keeping its server infrastructure running is from Ads. From the earlier statistics presented, we see that majority of the world’s search happens on Google. My personal big question here is, can it ever happen that Google which is currently enjoying its monopoly will one day become complacent and make their search engine a paid service, where you will have to pay before you can make a search; or buy a subscription package to be apportioned a number of searches?
Are there laws that can prevent this from ever happening? How will this affect our lifestyle if this should become a reality? Assuming this happens will it be a good opportunity for other competitors in the search engine market to win clients over?
Please leave your thoughts on this in the comments section.
