Is Google's Dominance in the Search Market Under Threat?
Google is most often in the news for good reasons—mainly for its futuristic technology efforts—but its 2014 Q4 earnings showed a slowness in profits in addition to missing the earnings-per-share mark. StatCounter revealed that for the first time in years, Google search’s share in the US went below 75 percent in January 2015, while Google's rivals Bing and Yahoo observed marginal upward growth. Google still holds the majority of the search market share, but does its slow decline in market share put its dominance under threat?
The dip in Google's search engine usage is being directly attributed to the 2013 deal between Mozilla and Yahoo. This deal made Yahoo the default search engine for the Mozilla Firefox browser, which earlier had Google as its default search engine. This move helped increase Yahoo's share of the search engine market. The number of users of Yahoo on Firefox grew from 9.9 percent in November 2014 to 28.3 percent in January 2015. The percentage of Firefox users using Google on the browser declined from 81.9 percent to 63.9 percent over the same period.
The deal between Apple and Google that made the latter the default search engine for the Safari browser is going to end soon. If Google and Apple somehow aren't able to renew their deal, it would mean a significant hit to Google ad revenue via Safari, as it had close to 26 percent US market share in the mobile and PC space.
There is also speculation that Apple is building its own search engine and has been putting research effort in this direction for the last few years. It is clear that Google is running a good deal of risk here and either of its major competitors could get a boost if they find a way to be the default search option on Apple devices.
On the other hand, Facebook might have successfully developed a walled garden of more than a billion users—while search engines like Google have limited access to its users' enormous amount of data. Facebook also seems to be building its search capabilities, which could challenge Google in the long run. In Facebook's recent earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg said, “We’re on this multi-year voyage to basically index all the content and make it available to people and rank it well.”
In addition to the established players, Google is also facing threats from newer players such as SciNet. Researchers say that people using SciNet can get relevant and diverse search results faster, especially when they do not know exactly how to formulate a query to find it. Google's former CEO Eric Schmidt recently mentioned "...someone, somewhere in a garage is gunning for us. I know, because not long ago we were in that garage. Change comes from where you least expect it..."
Given Google search's current domination and humongous market share, it will be difficult to knock it from its pole position, though it’s facing a worthy threat from a myriad of competitors.
