The Fall of Google Search: Part 1 - Ads
This is Part 1 of a 3-part series I’m writing on The Fall of Google Search. To me, there are 3 things contributing to its downfall: Ads, Privacy, and declining results quality.
So, let’s dig into it!
Google is still the default search engine for most of the world. It has a whopping 93% market share, with the next largest, Bing, having 2.8%. I mean that’s insane. Over 76% of all global searches take place on Google.
It currently processes over 3.5 billion searches per day, 237 billion per month, and 1.2 trillion per year. It’s hard to wrap our heads around how large those numbers actually are. When Google was founded in 1998, it processed only about 10,000 internet searches per day. Only a year later, Google shot up to 3.5 million searches per day. That’s a 17,000% increase in one year. In the years that followed, it kept increasing a crazy fast speed and firmly solidified itself as the dominating power in Search. That means a lot of eyeballs on your search engine. Let’s think about what we could do with those…
Well, one way to make money, and make it fast, is to sell advertising. Now, if you’ve read my article about The Insane Monopoly and Economy That Is Google Search, you’ll know that since 2002, advertising has been the lion’s share of Google’s revenue, making approximately $237.8 billion in ads in 2023, which was “low” according to their projections, by the way. They expect ad revenue to hit $340 billion by 2027.
340 BILLION dollars. That’s more than the entire GDP of Denmark, Singapore, Ireland, or Portugal.
All that ad revenue translates into, say it with me, a shit ton of ads! And with that projection for 2027, I don’t see it slowing down at all, which means even more ads in our SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) in the coming years.
I mean, just look at this search I did for “water bottle.” The entire page is ads. In fact, there are 17 ads that I can see just by scanning the page. No information on water bottle materials, a little wiki clip of the history of the water bottle, or any other information about water bottles in general. No, Google wants to sell you a water bottle because their ad customers want to.
With all of those ads being pushed into our faces as users, there has no doubt been lots of backlash against the conflation of advertising and information on the Internet. Users straight up do not want to see ads absolutely everywhere, especially when trying to perform (what used to be) a simple and quick search for a specific and accurate result.
We know this for a few reasons, excluding the ad hoc ones:
The widespread use of ad-blockers on Internet browsers.
The increasing popularity of ad-free search rivals.
The use of ad-blockers across the internet is a practice that’s been around for quite a long time, but is gaining momentum in recent years due to more widespread education about privacy. The most popular add-ons for ad-free browsing are AdBlock, which has over 350 million downloads on Chrome, and Adblock Plus, which has over 500 million downloads. Globally, 32.8% of internet users between 16 and 64 use ad blocking tools “at least sometimes” and 33% of Americans block ads altogether. The highest portion worldwide is actually in China, where 40.5% of users in that age group use an ad blocker…interesting. According to the Global Web Index, nearly half of internet users between the ages of 16 and 64 would prefer to use an ad-free search engine.
In the last few years, there have been many ad-free browsers and search engines that have appeared on the market: Brave, Kagi, Mojeek, Startpage, Opera, and Edge are just a few that come to mind.
Brave is an ad-free, privacy-oriented search engine alternative to Google. I should mention that another large point of contention is the privacy (or lack thereof) of Google. With ads come tracking- namely user behavior, search queries, browsing history, and sometimes location data, in order to “personalize” the ads. This tracking raises privacy concerns as it involves collecting and analyzing user’s personal information, which I’m going to cover in my Part 2 of this series.
Kagi is a privacy-focused search engine as well, but it’s unique in that rather than relying on ad revenue, it asks a subscription fee from users. It has no tracking at all and offers personalization in the form of user feedback, where users can mute or boost results they prefer.
Mojeek is an ad-free search engine that has a unique approach to search in that it uses its own web crawler (MojeekBot), index, and ranking algorithms. They are the first search engine to have a non-tracking privacy policy and pride themselves on having a short policy that respects the end user.
Another interesting search engine that’s actually been around for a while is Ecosia, whose mission is a simple one: they use ad revenue to plant trees. Not quite ad-free, but at least they’re using that revenue to do something good for the planet instead of hoarding that wealth.
Brave also has its own ad-free browser with a strong focus on privacy by default. It has unique features like earning crypto for viewing privacy-respected ads, private messaging app, and initiatives for a more private web commerce model.
Startpage is an interesting one. It’s a Dutch company that basically allows users to get Google search results while protecting their privacy by not storing personal information or data, and removing all trackers.
Opera and Edge are both ad-free, but they have some drawbacks. While Opera has an integrated ad blocker and VPN, it’s not as efficient or fast as Brave, for example. Edge, which is Microsoft’s new Chromium-based browser, still relies heavily on Google’s infrastructure.
While all of these options are still the teeniest minority compared to Google Search, they’re growing! And interest in ad-free search alternatives is growing as well.
Startpage, which I mentioned earlier, has seen significant growth over the past few years and currently has over 5 million monthly active users. Ecosia, the “environmentally conscious” one has over 15 million active users per month and has planted over 160 million trees.
Listen, people just don’t want to see ads. When asked why they use ad-blocking tools, users' top reasons are “there are too many ads” 62%, and “ads get in the way” 54%. The next few in the list are related to privacy, which again, I’m going to dive into in the next part of this series.
What’s interesting here is that despite this user feedback, behaviors, and loss of customers, Google isn’t going to change their ways, it’s just too damn lucrative. They don’t care that you hate ads. They don’t care that you installed an extension (on Chrome cough cough) to block them. They don’t even care that they’re losing users (customers) to ad-free alternatives. They’re still making hundreds of billions of dollars every single year to show you an ad (or 50) for the next trendy water bottle.
The dominance of this once unassailable giant is clearly facing some challenges, one of which we’ve discussed today. As we move onto the next part in my series, Privacy, we’ll explore the privacy concerns surrounding Google Search and how it impacts user trust and loyalty. Stay tuned as we continue to examine the complex dynamics shaping the future of Search.
Thanks for reading! Which browser is your favorite? Let me know in the comments.