Arguably, Google has been the most important company of the past 25 years. Other companies may claim that mantle – Apple for the technology we use, or Microsoft for the software we use on it – but the way that Google organised the world’s information and made it accessible has had an unparalleled impact. It brought order to the Wild West of the internet and made it useful in so many ways. Yet, there are signs emerging that Google’s influence is waning. This article from The Verge asks, have we passed peak Google?
Google has always faced competitors for web traffic and ad dollars. The search competitors of the early 2000’s, the social platforms of the 2010’s and the emerging AI platforms of the 2020’s. Over the past few years, a growing cohort of young users are starting their searches on TikTok or Instagram rather than Google. But perhaps the biggest threat to Google is an internal one. There is a growing chorus of criticism that suggests Google Search itself is not as accurate and as comprehensive as it once was.
Many people will look at AI chatbots like ChatGPT and suggest that they will just continually chip away at Google’s search dominance and ad-driven business model. And that may be true, but as this article suggests, many of Google’s challenges are of their own making and they’ve been bubbling up to the surface long before OpenAI launched ChatGPT.
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