People around the world use Google to conduct approximately 99,000 internet searches per second.
But now, the dominance of Google and its parent company Alphabet is under attack. The results could determine how people search for information online.
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By deploying AI Overview, Google is effectively competing with its own internet search results. This comes as lawsuits and AI rivals threaten Google's dominance.
Alphabet's immediate objections are legal. The Justice Department, which concluded closing arguments in its first case against the company this month, accused Alphabet of illegally paying companies to make its Google search engine the default on smartphones and web browsers. A second antitrust trial regarding Alphabet's advertising practices is looming this fall.
The long-term threat is technology. Some analysts have suggested that artificial intelligence (AI) will erode Google's dominance in search. That's not a foregone conclusion for a $2.2 trillion company. But two threats put Alphabet in an awkward position.
Rapid developments in AI are forcing Google to act quickly, at a time when increased government oversight could slow or curtail Google's most aggressive moves.
“There’s an AI arms race going on,” says Chris Rogers, founder and CEO of CSP, a Colorado-based company that helps companies get noticed on the internet. “It's going to be a huge change in search.”
People search the Internet approximately 99,000 times per second using a single company's technology. It's so common that computer users don't even call it a “search.” “Google”, or “googlear” (Spanish), or “Google” (Arabic), or topics.
But now, the dominance of Google and its parent company Alphabet is under attack. The company, which has easily defeated legal and technological challengers since it was founded in 1998, now faces perhaps its biggest threat yet. And the results could shape how people search for information online.
Alphabet's immediate objections are legal. The Justice Department concluded the case this month with closing arguments alleging that Alphabet illegally paid other companies to make its Google search engine the default option on iPhones, other smartphones, and web browsers. A second antitrust trial regarding Alphabet's advertising practices is looming this fall.
Why I wrote this
a story focused on
By deploying AI Overview, Google is effectively competing with its own internet search results. This comes as lawsuits and AI rivals threaten Google's dominance.
AI could drive rapid change in search
The long-term threat is technology. Analysts suggest that artificial intelligence (AI) will erode Google's search dominance for much of this year. But that's not a foregone conclusion for a company that makes a whopping $2.2 trillion in profits.
Still, two legal threats put Alphabet in an awkward position. Rapid advances in AI are forcing the company to act quickly, as increased government oversight could slow or curtail Google's aggressive moves. To stay ahead of competitors, business owners may have to run rather than walk on eggshells of legal risk.
“There’s an AI arms race going on,” says Chris Rogers, founder and CEO of CSP, a Colorado-based company that helps companies get noticed on the internet. “It's going to be a huge change in search.”
No one knows how quickly that change will occur. Consumers may be hesitant to trust AI chatbots, which can sometimes be misleading. Still, it's clear that today's search model is ripe for change.
“Google will show you, say, 10 links. So it will show you 13 ads and 10 links. That's one way to find information,” said CEO of OpenAI. ) Sam Altman said on Lex Fridman's podcast last month. “Maybe there's a better way to help people find information, act on it, and integrate it.”
Can AI-generated search results still be trusted?
OpenAI poses one of the strongest challenges to Alphabet's dominance. The company has been one step ahead of Google since releasing its chatbot ChatGPT at the end of 2022. Alphabet's Gemini chatbot went public a year later, facing off against well-funded competitors such as Amazon and Meta.
The challenge for these companies is that no chatbot is accurate enough to provide consistently reliable answers like a Google search. And nothing comes close to the search experience and training data that Alphabet has meticulously captured over his nearly 30 years. The challenge for Alphabet is that incorporating AI into search could cut into its traditional search business, which generated more than half of its revenue last quarter.
Nevertheless, Alphabet is moving forward by incorporating Gemini into all of its products. At this week's developer conference, the company announced that it would be rolling out an AI overview. This feature consolidates even complex questions into categorized pages with simplified answers. One demo showed a map of four top Pilates studios and their routes within a 30-minute walk of Boston's Beacon Hill. Another article suggested a specific solution from a video of a user with an older record player that wasn't working properly.
This technology was not foolproof. Gemini suggested opening the back of the film camera as one of his solutions to film jams. But many Wall Street analysts are optimistic that Google can resolve these issues, raising rather than lowering their profit forecasts for the company.
Google's decline: possible but inevitable
Gene Munster, managing partner at technology investment firm Deepwater Asset Management, tweeted earlier this week that “Google has the edge” against OpenAI. He cited the company's 25 years of search data to train its AI models, global distribution, and huge infrastructure as major advantages over competitors.
“Right now, we don't see any signs of that.” [the competitors] says Tim Lee, author of the Understanding AI Newsletter.
Google's legal crisis has become even more pressing. If it loses the current contract lawsuit, the company may not be able to pay Apple to make Google Search the default option on iPhones, potentially eroding its huge user base. A loss in a digital ad technology lawsuit this fall could hit the core of Google's ad-based search revenue. (The company did not respond to requests for comment.)
The last time a U.S. company faced such intense antitrust scrutiny was Microsoft in 1998, but the lawsuit may distract executives and rein in some of the company's aggressive actions. Became.
“Google is not out of the woods,” said Shane Greenstein, a management professor at Harvard Business School. “There's a lot of speculation about where future growth will come from.”
