How Google retains more than 90% of search market share
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-google-retains-more-than-90-of-market-share-2018-4
This article discusses the dominance of Google in online searches. Through the core Google search function, other Google functions including Google (Image) and Google Maps, and subsidiaries like Youtube, altogether Google has an impressive 90.8% market share of web, mobile, and in-app searches online. Google processes 3.5 billion searches a day. The reason Google has been at the forefront is because getting millions of people to try and keep using a different search engine is very expensive. A company would only attempt to challenge Google if their product is exponentially better.
In class we learned about the search industry and how companies such as Google and Facebook get much of their revenue from advertisements. These companies have established a reputation for their search algorithms as well their advertisement pricing algorithms(including auctions). This article exemplifies how the combination of effective search and advertisement strategies results in the massive revenues of these companies. If Google wasn’t such an ubiquitous search engine, it wouldn’t necessarily need to develop an efficient ad pricing algorithm. Although we didn’t learn the exact formula and algorithm of pricing that Google uses, this article puts into perspective how important it is to understand and develop a method for getting relevant advertisements allocated to the appropriate slots. In addition, Google’s page rank algorithm is what makes it one of the most widely used search engines, and we also learned about how authorities and hubs are updated to reflect their relevance to a particular search item. Not only does this make Google effective as a search engine, it makes its users more likely to keep returning and using it (versus another company or product), which creates user loyalty and that is essential for search engines. An example of a search engine that wasn’t quite as successful at this as Google was, mentioned in the article, was Microsoft’s Bing and privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo. Page rank algorithms don’t just affect the search engines, however, search results (and the companies/creators behind them) depend on this.