Monopoly: Search Engine Edition
At Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference this week they announced that they would be ditching Google as their default search engine within Spotlight in the place of Bing and giving DuckDuckGo more prominence within their OS as an alternative search engine for Safari. This move is an extension to when they previously chose to use Bing for Siri back in 2013.
The change will affect all forthcoming versions of OS X and iOS (iOS8 and Yosemite) and has caused many critics to speculate on the Apple, Google and Microsoft love/hate triangle. Also, with reports of Yahoo trying to end its search deal with Microsoft to start it’s own search venture with Apple and undisclosed costs to secure primary search within their devices there could soon be some big changes to how and with whom we choose to search. Yet, regardless of these changes, recent search engine market share studies have said that Google currently holds 67.5% of all global searches as of March 2014.
With an overall majority share and 19.4 billion searches performed in March alone you can see why Google is facing anti-trust lawsuits like that recently filed by consumer rights law firm Hagens Berman, alleging that Google has “illegally monopolised” the internet, and mobile search market by placing their applications within Android. They also claim that Google have made a monopoly through anti-competitive market manipulation and placement of these applications rather than offering a better search engine to the consumer.
Furthermore, the European Commission’s issues with Google still remain unresolved with a second attempt to settle allegations being rejected. The European Commission are arguing that Google are abusing their dominance of the web and crushing rivals in other markets because of it and with fines possibly extending up to a tenth of it’s global $50 billion annual revenue the European Commission aren’t messing around.
Putting all your eggs in one basket
Whatever your stance on Google as a monopoly, if you look at it on a whole, it’s difficult to actively find what you’re looking for on the web without them. Their results often provide you with exactly what you’re looking for, whether it be embedded in instant answers, rich snippets or the knowledge graph for example.
However, having a closer search market share that provides users with a better experience overall definitely wouldn’t be a bad thing, and with the recent search market share reports as a comparison, it really puts in perspective of how far ‘other’ search engines need to go to provide accurate results and a better user experience to their users to win over a bigger market share.
Then again, we’re probably right in thinking that many people are sort of ‘stuck’ with Google, it’s a habit that they can’t shift like looking something up on Wikipedia or shopping on Amazon; it’s just something we do. However, with the recent changes to iOS and OS X and campaigns like Bing It On that challenges you to pick a winner between duplicate searches in Google and Bing to find an overall winner we could see the market changing in the future. Yet, many consumers often don’t understand the basic difference between these search engines or what makes each of them different, how they work or what their ideologies are, like the way each search engine handles your data for example which should be addressed.
A History of Search
The Search Engine in it’s simplest form existed long before the Google of today, in the form of archives and directories as there weren’t trillions of websites that we have to siphon through today, so you could catalogue them into categories like the Virtual Library did or dMoz both still accessible today.
Directories were one solution to the problem of giving the first internet users access to content and the Virtual Library originally created by Tim Berners-Lee presenting users with a list of web servers and categories manually managed by a set of admins. As you can expect directories were quickly replaced by robot crawlers, engines such as Altavista and Yahoo used ‘robots’ to ‘crawl’ through each individual page and retrieve a description and title of the page to categorize it and then store a basic copy of it to be served to the user when a search was performed.
The first search engines such as Yahoo! used humans to sort through information and provide the consumer with the best results for that query, however this caused problems when it came to the less popular, obscure searches as often the results you retrieved didn’t accurately reflect the keywords you entered. Between this period and Google, we had a number of other search engines like Ask and Altavista, which are still around today that provided everything from human editors to meta search engines that compiled data from a number of sources and used an algorithm to sort the results into the best result for the user.
We’ve come long way from some of these primitive methods and Google has arguably been the main driving force in this, starting with Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s seminal paper uniquely approaching link analysis and the generation of their PageRank algorithm. With a whole host of important milestones between 1998 and now Google have managed to provide users with access to the data they need through rich snippets, instant answers, knowledge graphs, search suggestions and a vast selection of search tools from images to videos and scholarly papers.
The ‘others’
No, i’m not talking about those people on NBC’s Lost, I’m talking about the other search engines out there like Microsoft, Yahoo, Ask, AOL and Duck Duck Go, even Baidu and Yandex deserve a mention. With market shares slowly growing each month, search engines like Bing could soon be fixing the dominance we spoke about earlier.
However, recent figures suggest that rather than taking market share away from Google they are instead fighting between themselves with Bing taking 0.2% away from Yahoo! between the months of February and March of this year. So lets get to know some of the different (but popular) engines out there and their prospects, ideologies and possible future.
Duck Duck Go
Hatching back in 2007, Duck Duck Go challenges Google with secure searches. Normally search engines tailor results depending on your demographic, search history, click history, opinions and reviews filtering much of the information you would normally see within search pages. For example, a person who frequented news websites about political unrest or military coups would have different results returned when searching something broad like ‘Egypt’ than a person who visited holiday deal and websites regarding places to visit.
Furthermore, your data could potentially be sold as a ‘profile’ of you to third party websites or intercepted over HTTP (if not encrypted). Duck Duck Go use HTTPS by default which protects search data from leaking between the client and the server and store no history or data about the IP address, user agent or information in browser cookies that tie the data back to you.
Rich Snippets & Structured Data
Duck Duck Go have completely redesigned their site taking into account a number of categories we may need as snippets like place, weather or audio information. The image above shows an Audio search for Wavves. As you can see it has pulled album and song information from Soundcloud by number of likes. It displays album covers, runtime and a horizontal scrolling feed of the top tracks.
Bing have recently released the updated search function that allows you to display the top songs of an artist, their videos across a number of different platforms (Vimeo, Youtube etc) and related artists yet the whole thing feels slightly clunky with no way of sorting the results you get. Similarly the results don’t seem to be ordered in any way as for example with the search I performed for ‘Wavves’ that shows randomised results of a broad picture of their song base and even some that don’t belong to them.
Using Google for a web search provides everything including official videos, useful information and videos of their recent album covers and the band all on the fist page of results. Useful right?
Bing & The ‘Bing it On’ Challenge
Advertised as a ‘decision engine’, Bing focuses on areas such as travel, shopping and local elements to return you the simplest amount of results with the easiest method of sorting all the information. Features such as Autosuggest, Best Match, Instant Answers and Deep Links are all features Microsoft has built to provide users with better experiences within Bing.
The engine’s homepage is a completely customisable HTML5 background video that often displays differently coloured images (currently a moving underwater scene) and allows users to customise their search ‘homepage’ similar to what Google tried with iGoogle apart from the awful widgets. Bing also provide the search engine for Yahoo, AltaVista and more recently Apple’s Siri. Different to Google’s search algorithms and PageRank system Bing use a ‘match feature’ that attempts to prioritise search results by relevance to the user.
In blind tests, using the UK’s most popular searches, more people picked Bing results than Google *Based on an unbranded comparison of the web search results pane only; excludes all ads and Google’s Knowledge Graph. The UK’s most popular web searches are taken from the top algorithmic search results according to Google Between December 2012 and June 2013
Microsoft have released a survey that claims that side by side in a blind test most users chose Bing over Google. There are many reasons why this campaign fails and I’d say the best article to explain it is over at Moz by Dave Wilson of MazeMedia who argues that there are 11 reasons bing it on makes no sense discussing everything from different typography to existence of snippets and adverts (even though they’re meant to be all removed).
Anyway, here are some searches we performed using this weeks top five searches taken from Google Trends and the results we received, as you can probably guess, we chose Google every time.
Diego Costa
Why? Diego Costa recently passed his medical for his move to Chelsea for £32m from Atletico Madrid. In other words, big news!
On this occasion the left bar is Bing, they choose to put the news snippet right at the top highlighting the Daily Mail as the most credible/popular source then the Telegraph, BBC and finally outside of the snippet the Mirror. It then repeats the same news article listed within the snippet and image as the second ranking organic search rank.
This doesn’t look like the most organised and precise way to show me the information I require. Google handle it better showing me firstly Wikipedia (if I wanted to know who Diego Costa actually is), some recent news articles from places like the Guardian and the Independent (not trying to appear snobby), and also a video highlighted in structured data if I wanted to watch something rather than reading.
WWDC
Apple’s recent World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) threw the internet into a frenzy with millions of searches all across the internet.
Bing’s organic search results lead with structured data from the official page which is nice but then goes onto an article from before the conference stating ’10 things to expect from Apple’ and then chooses to highlight other news content and articles from CNET, Business Insider and expectations from Wall Street Journal. Google goes with news articles at the top, the official website as the first organic search result, then what they announced and information post-WWDC including videos from the Guardian and Apple on YouTube.
GameOver Zeus
What? GameOver Zeus has been a popular search due to the large botnet the U.S Department of Justice announced they took down a couple of days ago.
In this case, Google is on the left and Bing is on the right. Both Google and Bing choose to move news articles to the top of their SERPs with Google choosing to opt for a associated photograph (someone using sublime within OS X in this case) whereas Bing remains plain.
Although both show the similar article, Google choose to include the author and with a higher font weight making it more prominent on their page. They also choose to show rel=author image and a varied range of news articles from different sources. Bing include Videos rather prominently but the videos look somewhat amateur and uninformative to your average user.
Location, location, location
A number of search engines are thriving in countries with censorship and language barriers such as Baidu of China and Yandex of Russia, where strict political hindrances cause moral issues for Google and Yahoo due to their feelings towards censorship
The future
Potentially in the future we could see a wider more diverse search engine market with Apple and Yahoo partnering up to make a new search engine. However, this idea is so far down the pipeline it’s hard to even visualise this happening. We could also see Bing grabbing more of the search engine market share from Yahoo and other companies, but most likely we’ll see Google continue to hold the majority share in searches. Unfortunately, I don’t think at the moment any search engine can come close to what they currently provide.
Quick Summary
- Google may appear Evil, but we need them and love them
- Bing doesn’t really know who they want to be and need to figure that out first
- Places with ‘strict searching’ (censorship) are using other search engines rather well
- It will be interesting to see what Apple do when Yahoo finally review their deal with Bing
- Encryption is good, leakage is bad
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