A new batch of search engine startups positioning themselves as potential rivals to Google expects increasing regulatory pressure to finally reverse two decades of dominance by the search giant.
The most recent challenges include Neeva, launched by two former Google executives, and You.com, founded by the former chief scientist at Salesforce.com, as well as Mojeek, a UK-based start-up with growing ambitions of build your own billions of web pages index.
While their chances of success are long, each sees a different opportunity for a new approach to Google’s familiar list of links and results, which has evolved only gradually in recent years.
They also hope that a series of recent US antitrust cases against Google, both at the state and federal levels, could result in the field opening up.
“In many ways, it’s surprising, given how big the industry research is, that it hasn’t been fundamentally rethought,” said Richard Socher, chief executive officer of You.com, who left Salesforce’s artificial intelligence research team at July.
Google’s share of the global search market has remained at more than 90 percent for most of the past decade. Today, it remains close to its record high of more than 92 percent, according to Statcounter, which monitors activity on the web, followed by Bing with 2.9 percent and Yahoo with 1.5 percent.
However, Google’s longtime competitors, like DuckDuckGo, are making slow but steady gains. According to Statcounter, DuckDuckGo’s market share has grown from 0.3% to 1.9% in North America over the past five years.
In December, Apple added Berlin-based Ecosia, a nonprofit organization that invests most of its revenue in planting trees, as one of the integrated search options available to users of its Safari browser – the first new addition to your list of Google alternatives since DuckDuckGo in 2014.
“This is the result of many years of work,” said Christian Kroll, who founded Ecosia in 2009. “Basically, it took us a long time to develop the root system and now the plant is growing.”
Long chances
This painstaking process shows the long road ahead for You.com and Neeva, despite their prominent founders.
You.com is funded by Marc Benioff, founder and chief executive of Salesforce, and Jim Breyer, a venture capitalist and initial sponsor of Facebook. It presents itself as a “reliable search engine that sums up the web for you”. Socher is betting that advances in AI can be applied to research in more innovative ways than Google has ever tried.
“I want to see more confidence, more facts and, to some extent, more kindness on the Internet,” he said. “These three values are the cornerstones for creating a new search engine that is more private, more reliable and more convenient in some ways.”
You.com is still in private testing for now and Socher has not revealed how it plans to make money, although it does not rule out showing ads.
The most radical departure from its rival startup Neeva from the Google manual is that it charges a subscription, promising fewer ads and greater privacy.
Bill Coughran, a former Google executive and now a Neeva investor in venture capital firm Sequoia, sees his former employer’s ad dependency as his biggest vulnerability. “The biggest problem is that you start seeing more and more ads and it becomes more complex for the user to understand what is advertising and what is not,” he said.
Neeva, which raised $ 37.5 million in funding, also combines the results of a user’s emails and other personal information online with what it expects to be high-quality web results in specific niches, such as product research. .
“We designed a search engine very differently,” said Sridhar Ramaswamy, former head of advertising at Google and cofounder of Neeva.
The two new ventures have emerged this year, as Google faces a flood of regulatory complaints, including two state antitrust lawsuits and a federal case in the U.S., about what critics like Yelp claim to be monopolistic behavior.
Its alleged rivals hope that this could create new opportunities, whether it be distracting Google with lawsuits or restricting its ability to launch new products.
“For us, I think antitrust will be useful,” said Socher. “It depends on how it is performed.” But he added, “I don’t think antitrust will create happy users and customers – ultimately, it is necessary to create an incredible experience.”
Several aspiring Google rivals have tried and failed to do so in the past 10 years. Cuil, which was founded by two former Google engineers, raised $ 33 million and built its own index of more than 120 billion pages. But it closed in 2010, after just over two years of operation, after users complained about the quality of its results.
“Now, with Google being watched more closely by regulators, I hope that unfair practices will disappear and that will help the competition,” said Kroll. “If you’re a small search engine, it’s really difficult to get access to the technology, to get visibility, to get into these very rare slots in browsers.”
Winning these standard search slots usually comes at a price, such as sharing ad revenue, although Kroll declined to comment on his new deal with Apple, which came after a year of discussions.
Another contender
Apple itself appears to be building its own alternative to Google, increasing its web crawling activity and handling more queries on the iPhone’s home screen through its own search engines.
Most of Google’s competitors, including Neeva, DuckDuckGo and Ecosia, license their Bing web index from Microsoft. But Mojeek wants to build its own index to become truly independent.
“We are the only real search engine that doesn’t track you,” said Colin Hayhurst, chief executive of Mojeek.
With £ 2.3 million in funding, mostly from a single investor, Mojeek’s team of seven employees gathered and rated an index of 3.6 billion pages. It expects to reach 6 billion by the end of 2021, although it is a far cry from Google’s hundreds of billions.
Hayhurst suggested that other search engines that claimed to offer greater privacy still send some data back to Bing. “Most search engines are not really engines – they are chassis,” he said. “You could say that they are pawns in the Google-Microsoft war.”
So far, attempts by regulators to open the search market have struggled. The Android “screen of choice” auction, imposed by the European Commission in 2019 after fining Google $ 5 billion for imposing illegal restrictions on smartphone manufacturers, has not yet had much impact, according to Michael Ostrovsky, professor at Stanford University.
His recent article on the process run by Google, which presents new Android users with a choice of search alternatives, found flaws in the way the auction was designed. He tends to favor obscure companies that are more aggressive in their monetization of users, he found, instead of names like DuckDuckGo or Ecosia that users recognize and therefore can choose instead of Google.
“It is clear that the auction, as currently projected, is not meeting its objectives,” he said. “What is important is not so much specific regulation, but knowing that regulators are out there and paying attention.”