Hi there.
Today I want to take you through the future of search.
It's going to be a quick overview of what threats face Google in the next sort of decade
or so from existing competitors as well as new entries to the market.
First off, let's have a look at the existing competitors.
So we're talking about Yahoo! Bing mainly in sort of the UK/US markets, but we're also
seeing a massive growth in DuckDuckGo as well as Baidu, the Chinese search engine.
So if we look at Yahoo! Bing, the way Windows 10 ha integrated Bing is a massive step forward
for the search engine, and there's also been sort of complaints again that they're limiting
competition.
But this does present quite a good opportunity for Bing to grow its market share.
As well as this, it's had a tie up with Spotlight, the Apple search software, which means that
it basically is integrated into Apple iPhones and iPads and any devices running the iOS
software, which is a monumental market to be the default search engine on.
We also want to look at the threat from the newer competitors on the market.
So DuckDuckGo have formed a huge, comprehensive search engine based on the whole idea of privacy
being a huge issue and that Google infringes privacy too much with its existing products.
DuckDuckGo has seen a massive, massive growth and recorded four million searches per year.
So it's seeing sort of huge inroads in terms of becoming a big competitor to Google.
As well as this, Baidu is a huge competitor in China.
It absolutely dominates the search market, much like Google does here.
That search engine is available for users outside of China.
So anyone in Western Europe, America, or anywhere, in the same way that Google is, can use Baidu.
It would just take a good sort of marketing push to start integrating that wealth of knowledge
and expertise that Baidu obviously have into becoming a real competitor to Google and causing
it some real issues.
As well as the existing competitors, Google has also got to be slightly aware of areas
such as Amazon, Facebook, and Apple.
So Amazon is becoming one of the biggest competitors, and one of the heads of Google has already
stated that Amazon is their biggest competitor.
The reason he said this is because the product search on Amazon is huge.
The market it has is massive, and one of the issues for Google is that product search is
one of the main reasons why people advertise on Google.
Bringing in that revenue is a huge part of Google's advertising module, which brings
in $58 billion every year for their business, and this is a core driver of Google.
So that's a huge threat that Amazon have been able to pose.
They're really going to push forward with that, especially now they've started to exclude
Google AdSense in Amazon as well, and they have started to exclude products such as Google
Chromecast, for instance.
It shows how much of an influence Amazon want to become in that market.
Facebook also have over a billion users, and they recorded a billion active users in one
day, which again is not far off the numbers of Google.
It's just presenting another major opportunity for advertisers and Facebook itself to come
together and create a real competitor to Google.
One of the big areas that Facebook could really excel at is local.
It has a lot of location data.
A lot of people like things from their local areas, and the knowledge it has on users is
incredible.
Even competitor Google, which has a lot of tracking features, but it doesn't have the
actual raw information per user that Facebook has.
You can see through Facebook advertising at the moment how strong that data is to advertisers.
So that provides a humongous opportunity for Facebook to really rival Google, especially
in local searches and again probably moving into more web searches in the future.
There are also rumours that Apple may be using its Spotlight search feature, which has grown
massively in the instruction of the new iOS, to create a web competitor for searches to
Google.
There've been a lot of rumours about job posts for specialists in search.
This is one area that Apple, with its many billions in reserves, could give Google a
real fight in terms of the iOs devices having inbuilt search software that bypasses Google
completely.
So it's a huge threat to Google, especially as mobile devices are becoming so popular.
It would sort of mean Apple versus Android when it comes to mobile searches.
So it presents a massive opportunity for Apple and a major threat to Google.
So the future of search is looking a bit more diverse than it used to be, especially for
the UK and the US markets that have a massive reliance on Google.
The competitors are growing in number and in ability and posing a much greater threat
through specific types of searches, rather than Google sort of collect all search version
of its algorithm.
So hopefully that gives you a little bit more information on the future of search.
We've also written a blog post on it as well that you can have a look at.
And if you've got any questions, please feel free to follow me @Koozai_James.
Thank you.