Is Google suffering from innovator’s dilemma?

Google has become synonymous with search for over two decades now and they’ve worked hard at protecting that crowned position with incremental improvements to their search engine.

How Google became the most trusted source

When Google first became established, its search engine heavily relied on the number of backlinks (You can think of it as the number of websites that mention this website). This meant that websites with many backlinks, even if they were not relevant to the search query, would rank highly in the search results. This was causing a lot of frustration for users who were unable to find what they were looking for.

In response to this, Larry Page decided to make big changes to the search engine. He came up with a new algorithm that not only took into account the number of backlinks but also the quality of the content on a website and its relevance to the search query. This algorithm was the foundation of what would later become known as PageRank, one of the key factors that made Google the dominant search engine it is today.

With PageRank, Google’s search results became much more relevant and accurate, and this helped to establish the company as a trusted source for search. It also helped to attract more users to the site, which in turn led to increased advertising revenue and the growth of the company.

An AI-first company?

Google Search has improved incrementally since then, but not by leaps and bounds. Despite Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, stating in 2016 that Google was “evolving from a mobile-first to an AI-first company” and AI would be a key driver of innovation in the future, they allowed OpenAI to have a head start into conversational AI in 2016.

In fact, many users have complained that Google Search results quality has been on the decline for several years now. With the increasing use of search engine optimization (SEO) tactics by websites to improve their visibility in search results. While some SEO practices can be beneficial for users by helping to make websites more easily discoverable, other practices, such as keyword stuffing, can manipulate search results and lead to irrelevant or misleading information being ranked highly in search results.

If this sounds like wuwu to you, don’t worry about it. An overly simplistic way of explaining it just means that if I want to rank number one for “how to analyze Amazon stock”, I just keep repeating these keywords instead of providing real value to my readers inside my posts to increase my odds of being ranked higher.

I hate practices like these because it’s a humongous waste of time when I read an article only to find that it’s utter thrash despite being ranked so highly on Google Search.

Microsoft declared war on Google

Just this week on Feb 7, 2023, Microsoft declared war on Google and announced they’re launching an all new, AI-powered Bing search engine, to deliver better search, more complete answers, a new chat experience and the ability to generate content. 

“AI will fundamentally change every software category, starting with the largest category of all – search,” said Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, Microsoft. “Today, we’re launching Bing and Edge powered by AI copilot and chat, to help people get more from search and the web.”

The biggest difference this product has from the existing Google Search is the way it presents results. Rather than providing a list of links, where users have to click into each link to find out if it answers their query, the new way of search will provide a summarized response, while providing you with the links if you need them.

For example, I can ask it to plan a week-long trip to Tokyo for me and make sure to include a list of highly rated restaurants, day long hikes and the best spots for sakura viewing, or any other preferences I might have and it’ll plan my itinerary for me, with links to book my travel and accommodations.

There’s a good reason why Microsoft is approaching with much fanfare, AI is the buzzword for 2023 and the fastest way to get attention (inexpensively) is to ride on this trend and make a bold statement about how they’re going to disrupt the mighty Google Search.

Why didn’t Google reinvent itself?

Apart from declaring that they’re an AI-first company, Google is probably one of the companies that spent the most amount of money on AI.

So why did they miss out on this trend completely?

(It’s frustrating as a shareholder but they also missed out on the opportunity to make Google Workspace—doc, sheet, slides, meet, etc—great and it gave rise to a series of SaaS companies such as Zoom, Asana, Monday, Notion that swooped in with their solutions despite Google having such a massive head start.)

Alright, I shall stop digressing. Back to why Google missed this trend despite AI being their priority uno.

And it has got to do with the way they monetize their search results. The first couple of search results are frequently plastered with sponsored results.

Google would have to change the way they monetize ad revenue if they reinvented themselves to provide a summarized response instead of links. 

Don’t reinvent what works right?

But now with Microsoft’s declaration of war with a clear strategy, Google will have to move fast. And it’ll be interesting to watch this space evolve.

Don’t wipe Google off just yet

With Microsoft’s declaration of war, Google was hasty in releasing its own version of AI-powered search and made an embarrassment of itself.

Long story short, it gave a wrong answer while doing a live demonstration.

It signaled that they aren’t ready to fight Microsoft and OpenAI just yet.

But Google is still the default search engine for most phones and Android commands more than 70% of the market and Chrome browsers more than 65%.

And Apple will not stand to see Microsoft become that powerful… between Google and Microsoft, I believe they prefer to see Google succeed because Google has been much more “well-behaved”, paying Apple over ten billion dollars just to remain the default search engine for Apple Safari.