Battle of Search Engines
For the past two decades, Google has ruled the world of search engines. But the space is heating up again with new business models and technology.
Back in 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin came up with a search engine that was simply better than their competitors. Two young renegade founders looking to shake up the status quo.
A brief history of Google
Back in 1998, when Google was formed the founders wanted to build a search engine that provided the best unbiased results for the consumers. They also wanted to search the academic community through the search engine. The founders published a paper describing their objectives in a paper titled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”. They also explain that ad driven search engines are just bad:
We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers…….. we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.
While the paper detailed out why a advertising based revenue model is bad, it failed to lay out an alternative business model. Perhaps the naive founders expected VC money to last forever. But in 1999, the dot-com bubble burst and the founders and VC money was starting to run out. Google did have an awesome product, but no real roadmap of how to move forward.
Google quickly pivoted to an ad based revenue model and the rest is history. Today almost every product Google has, is used to collect user data, which is in turn used to drive ad revenue. The world is now waking up to the perils of an ad driven revenue model. The funny thing is that the pioneers of this model knew about it 20 years back. So much for “Don’t be Evil”.
Yet, Google does provide an awesome service. With amazing integrations to google maps and youtube, it is hard to beat the behemoth. For years, Google’s competitors such as Bing and Duckduckgo, while providing search results which were comparable to Google, could not take over the market share because of Google’s first mover advantage.
In recent years, a few search engines have come up which while providing good search results also have an innovative business model which is more user oriented as opposed to advertiser driven. It remains to be seen if these search engines can take over the market share.
Before we look at the various modern search engines lets take a look at the stakeholders a search engine has.
Stakeholders in a Search Engine
So far most search engines try to extract maximum revenue from advertisers, and end up optimising the search engine for the same. This model has been the norm for so long. However, now people are starting to question it. For example, shouldn’t the search engine pay some part of the revenue to the site owners for maintaining quality content? Or to users for giving their attention? Or to the early adopters of certain features of a search engine?
Just the fact that the founders of Google have gotten filthy rich from ads, points to the fact that there is something wrong in the current incentive design. Let’s take a look at some alternatives.
Alternative Search Engines
Ecosia
Ecosia is perhaps the most innovative business model in recent years not just for search, but for businesses in general. The basic idea is that all ad revenue goes either into product improvement or towards planting trees. At the time of this article the search engine has planted 128 million trees. While it is an ad driven business model, ecosia anonymises all searches within one week. It also gives the user ability to disable all tracking.
Ecosia currently has 16 million monthly users. (Compare that to Google’s 1 billion). Note that Ecosia is not the only charity based search engine out there. Some others contribute towards giving clean water, marine life and miscellaneous good causes. Here is an article with a better list.
While some people are very passionate about charitable causes, the vast majority of people will only switch to a search engine if it is a better product. The problem with Ecosia is that its main marketing is not based on the quality of its results, but rather on how it is good for the world.
Brave
Brave launched its search engine in beta just a week back. It has its own private index of the web, which is kind of a big deal. Note that Ecosia, and other charity search engines still rely on Bing or Google to index the web.
Brave claims to never track its users. Ads which are served to the user are matched completely on the edge, and the lion’s share of the ad revenue is paid out to the user. If you use brave search within the brave browser you can basically make money. (Its small amount, so dont dream of getting rich just yet).
Brave has also announced that it would be launching free and paid versions of their search. The free version would be driven by ads, though the ads would be generated without tracking the user on the cloud or collecting user data.
Neeva
Neeva is a new premium search engine started by a bunch of senior ex-Google employees. They claim that upto 40% of search results on Google are from ads leading to a sub-optimal user experience. Hence, they left to start their own search engine.
Neeva is a paid search engine though, with a subscription based model. Imagine paying for searching the internet. Its not all that crazy, given the fact that people did start paying for music eventually. Furthermore, if executed correctly, Neeva could be acquired by a lot of companies and included in their subscription service bundle. My bet (and hope) is that Apple would do this at some point in the future.
Neeva has also promised to pay 20% of its top line revenue to creator websites, including Medium and Quora. It would be interesting to see how this plays out. It could mean reduced prices for Medium members who are subscribed to Neeva.
Since Neeva is a paid search engine, Neeva customers are going to be people who are relatively well off. When such a filtering of people occurs anywhere in the world, it unlocks a host of benefits for users(think credit cards at airport lounges). I would not be surprised if Neeva users get a variety of benefits across the internet, in a way that the subscription pays for itself.
When Google started out, it made the decision to not charge customers, as having a higher volume of search queries helped it improve the quality of search. The only reason Neeva is able to have a paid premium business model is due to Google abusing customer data.
Final thoughts
It is definitely interesting to see innovation in a field which has been stagnant for a while. Note that quality of search results amongst these search engines is not very different. What is different is the business model, the level of privacy, and consequently the personalisation of results.
Google knows everything about you and is able to serve the most personalised results at the moment. This has a lot of perks including being able to find pizza near you at midnight. No other search can answer this query in an acceptable manner at the moment.
While some of these search engines have built their own index of the web, google is the only one that has built an index of the real world with Maps. This sets google apart massively from its competitors at the moment. Furthermore, the competitors are new and small. Do users really care about their privacy enough to switch to a less personalised search experience?
