Disrupting Google Search

In 2014, Eric Schmidt said this about Google’s competition: “Many people think our main competition is Bing or Yahoo. But, really, our biggest search competitor is Amazon”

On a daily basis, 15 percent of queries submitted have never been seen before by Google's search engine. This highlights just how long the tail is of search (and also just how differently people phrase perhaps similar questions).

From a vertical perspective, while Google Search fares well across the board, Retail is typically the largest vertical.

Today, Google largely indexes the public web. But often when searching for items, the best results might be contained in internal work documents or in email.

Another example is Neeva which is a subscription-model based search engine which was founded by former Google execs. Neeva is ad-free and privacy-focused, and allows user to customize search results to their liking.

For voice searches, it is harder to display relevant ads. One way around this is to directly monetise the transaction (i.e., suggesting to book an event / buy a product / make a reservation after the user queries). The other way around this is a structual benefit that likely some if not most commercial queries will not shift to voice long-term, and... See more

Per Wedbush, as of today, 80% of queries are still not monetized by ads (given not being of a commercial nature), so there continues to be a lot of room for Google to show more ads.

The key drivers of the business are: number of ad impressions/clicks and the effective price per impression/click.

On mobile, Google still has to pony up $5-10B per year (and rising) to remain the default search engine on iOS.