Could Google Have More Competition?
Happy new year! What’s going on, everybody!? This is Mike Norris. This is #WeBuildWednesdays and I’m your host. Today, on episode 17, we have Google vs. DuckDuckGo? Yeah, sort of an unlikely opponent for Google. Just to keep you up to speed here, if you don’t know what DuckDuckGo is, it’s another search engine. They maybe hold one-percent market share in terms of searching, so not too much there. But they picked a pretty big opponent here and that’s, you know, Google.
Google v. DuckDuckGo
So, to take you a little bit back and walk you through what’s happened here. DuckDuckGo recently started to get a little bit more traction. So, they’ve doubled their total amount of daily searches year-over-year, so they’re up to about 30 million now. That’s a 100 percent increase year-over-year, so that’s great. But Google is still 92 percent of all searches. They’re the king. After them comes Bing with two percent and also Yahoo with two percent, so no competition.
But DuckDuckGo did recently really rattle Google by coming out with a study. Basically, they had a bunch of people search the exact same thing all at one time. They weren’t logged into their browser nor were they logged into Google. And the study produced these results that said that Google still tracks you even when you’re not logged in, which means they’re delivering personalized results on an individual level, even when people were not logged into Google [in incognito mode]. So they’re saying that Google’s tracking extends beyond just your browser and being logged into Google, which obviously raises privacy concerns, especially in this day and age with Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica data leak going on. So Google has come back and basically said, “This is BS.” They said that they don’t actually do this and that this has been a longstanding myth. And Google actually disproved it. They don’t actually serve up as individualized search requests as everyone thinks they do.
The Google MythBuster
One of the things I have said in the past, and some of you have maybe even heard me say it, is that I can search something and my results will be completely different than the person next to me who searches something and the person next to them who searches something. It’s actually not true. So, what might happen, and what Google says happens, is that I’ll search something and, within the next 10 to 15 minutes, if I search something else that’s related to it, then they’ll give me personalized results. But they don’t track me on an individual basis in terms of really knowing what it is that I’m doing. So, the reason that all these people were able to produce those results is because Google basically said they didn’t control a lot of different things like location, browser, timing, all that kind of stuff.
So Google has disproved it. Does it really matter? Probably not, because Google’s the ginormous titan in the industry and people aren’t going to stop using them regardless. But Google has chosen to play nice, so they gave DuckDuckGo the domain Duck.com, which Google actually owned. And they just gave it over to them, even with all this going on. They basically said, “Here, you can have this. We don’t actually care about you. You’re not a threat to us.”
So, if you’re wondering what’s going on, that’s what it is. Does it impact you? No, it really doesn’t. Google will continue to operate the same way that it currently does. Google still has that 92 percent of all searches done in the entire world. I think that percentage is even higher in America and, when you look at mobile numbers, it’s pretty similar, too. So, Google will continue to be the giant, that’s why we’re Google Partners here. That’s why we’re in Google’s back pocket: Because we know that’s where all the people are. And, if you’re going to try to reach a lot of people, you have to go to where they’re at.
This is #WeBuildWednesdays episode 17: Google vs. DuckDuckGo? I love saying that. Alright, have a good one. See you next week. Thanks!
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