Tiago Bianchi
Research expert covering internet & gaming in Latin America and Spain
Get in touch with us nowMarket leaders and newcomers: Just Google it?
As of March 2023, Google remains the leading search engine worldwide with a desktop market share of almost 84 percent. The California-based search giant has dominated the market for over a decade, consistently handling over 60 percent of all search queries in the United States. But while Google remains the top player, its online domination hasn’t extended everywhere: in Russia and China, for example, the service is overshadowed by domestic competitors Yandex and Baidu. Elsewhere, online users are increasingly choosing privacy- or sustainability-focused alternatives such as DuckDuckGo or Ecosia due to data collection and privacy concerns.Industry trend: AI in search
In early 2023, the well-established search market became hot again with the launch of several AI-based chatbots that enable users to find information online via a conversational interaction. Developed by OpenAI, ChatGPT burst onto the scene in November 2022 and quickly gained a lot of attention for articulate answers and detailed responses to user queries, despite the inaccuracy of some of the facts it delivered. In January 2023, Microsoft announced a multi-billion investment in OpenAI, and shortly after launched a new version of its Bing search engine powered by upgraded ChatGPT AI, which would allow users to chat to Bing like ChatGPT. Not to be outdone, Google also released an experimental conversational search service called Bard, which is based on its LaMDA AI program. However, factual errors during the launch event caused Google's stock to lose about 100 billion U.S. dollars in value, highlighting the risk of such experimental product releases.Several other digital giants have since announced that they are also working on conversational search products which are powered by AI. As of February 2023, these include Chinese search company Baidu and their product Wenxin Yiyan (Chinese) or ERNIE Bot (English), South Korean search giant Naver and their service SearchGPT, as well as Russian competitor Yandex with its YaLM 2.0 offering. All of these are set to launch in 2023.
Despite the strong presence of industry heavyweights, there are also a number of startups in the AI-powered search sector that have been working on similar options. One of them is You.com, which has been building search based on generative AI since 2020 and received 25 million U.S. dollars in during its latest funding round in summer 2022.
Online search behavior: mobile-first
With mobile devices already accounting for over half of the global website traffic, it comes as no surprise that mobile searches also make up a significant part of search volumes worldwide. In the United States, for example, the Google Search app is the fourth most-popular application on mobile devices in the country, whereas Google claims by far the largest market share among mobile search providers.Advertising and marketing
Thanks to machine learning and programmatic advertising, search engines no longer present unbiased search results relating to user keywords, but they also display suitable ads to audiences in real-time. As many online users turn to search engines first when looking to make a purchase, companies are increasingly focusing their marketing efforts on these platforms and implementing search engine optimization (SEO) tactics to maximize sales and exposure on the results page. Across the world, paid search advertising spending is seeing rapid growth, which again translates into record advertising revenues for Google sites.
