Google is losing its status as a verb

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”

In 2020, nearly 2/3rds of queries on Google ended on Google itself i.e., without clicking on an external link (organic or ad). This highlights how over time Google is increasingly showing the results for common queries inline (in its knowledge graph) rather than directing traffic to websites.

Universal search was the beginning of the troubles for google. Google used the massive power of their main search to knock competitor experiences and displace them. Yelp didnt stand a chance when Google indexed their results there.

Most people don’t want their information mediated by bloated, monopolistic, surveilling tech companies, but they also don’t want to go all the way back to a time before them. What we really want is something in between. The evolution of Google Search is unsettling because it seems to suggest that, on the internet we’ve built, there’s very little ro... See more