Disrupting Google Search

Especially in a work context, the data sources that might contain answers to queries are numerous and search is quite fragmented. People are searching through email, Google, their docs suite separately.

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).

Google Search today is doing ~$150B run-rate in revenue.

Google Search is great at indexing most content based websites, but arguably doesn’t do a great job with indexing some of the more user generated content and different media sources such as short-form video.

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”

In 2020, nearly 2/3rds of queries on Google ended on Google itself i.e., without clicking on an external link (organic or ad). This highlights how over time Google is increasingly showing the results for common queries inline (in its knowledge graph) rather than directing traffic to websites.

Another angle for disruption or chipping away at share is related to the horizontal, one-size fits all nature is by creating a more curated experience. As websites have started to game search engine optimization, the websites which rank at the top for many searches are because the algorithms like them rather than humans do.

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.

In general, query growth is relatively slow (Google already does >100B queries per month), but Google continues to show ads on more queries and optimize the click through rate and cost per click which continues to drive 30%+ revenue growth.