Google's Search Dominance

Google has been the market leader in online search for decades. To ‘Google’ something has even become a commonly accepted term. As our chart shows, when it comes to search engines, the product of parent company Alphabet is hard to beat, especially in the mobile segment.

According to data from Statcounter, Google had a market share of around 96 percent on smartphones in 2022. Yahoo! was used for 0.8 percent of all search queries, the Russian service Yandex came to one percent and the Chinese provider Baidu to around 1.1 percent. The market situation in the desktop sector is somewhat different, however. There, both Yahoo! and Yandex play a larger role. Another U.S. competitor, which is hardly represented when it comes to cell phone usage, can achieve a market share of around nine percent here: Microsoft's search engine Bing.

The tech company's Google rival has been available to the general public since January 2012, but despite its increasing use has been rather a fringe player in recent years. That could all now change. In January, Microsoft announced that it would invest ten billion US dollars in the AI startup OpenAI over several years. In return, the products of the company, which was founded as a non-profit and financed by Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, among others, are to be integrated into Microsoft applications across the board. A version of Bing supported by the ChatGPT text generator, for example, has been in closed beta since the beginning of the week.

Google, meanwhile, still seems to be struggling with problems implementing its ChatGPT competitor, Bard. In a promotional clip unveiling the AI product, the application made incorrect claims about the James Webb telescope, among other things. Alphabet's share price subsequently fell by around ten percent between the afternoon of February 7 and the morning of February 8.

Written by: Florian Zandt

Translated by: Anna Fleck