Disrupting Google Search

Especially in a work context, the data sources that might contain answers to queries are numerous and search is quite fragmented. People are searching through email, Google, their docs suite separately.

Today, Google largely indexes the public web. But often when searching for items, the best results might be contained in internal work documents or in email.

Google Search is great at indexing most content based websites, but arguably doesn’t do a great job with indexing some of the more user generated content and different media sources such as short-form video.

For voice searches, it is harder to display relevant ads. One way around this is to directly monetise the transaction (i.e., suggesting to book an event / buy a product / make a reservation after the user queries). The other way around this is a structual benefit that likely some if not most commercial queries will not shift to voice long-term, and... See more

On mobile, Google still has to pony up $5-10B per year (and rising) to remain the default search engine on iOS.

One is as above to pick a vertical, and offer a curated approach for that vertical. One example of this is WireCutter or even The Infatuation, which although are content sites, become the place many users start their “search” for products and restaurants rather than Google.

Another angle for disruption or chipping away at share is related to the horizontal, one-size fits all nature is by creating a more curated experience. As websites have started to game search engine optimization, the websites which rank at the top for many searches are because the algorithms like them rather than humans do.

In 2014, Eric Schmidt said this about Google’s competition: “Many people think our main competition is Bing or Yahoo. But, really, our biggest search competitor is Amazon”

Another example is Neeva which is a subscription-model based search engine which was founded by former Google execs. Neeva is ad-free and privacy-focused, and allows user to customize search results to their liking.