Throughout the trial, Google has defended its payments to Apple and smartphone makers to remain the default search engine, arguing that high-quality search results drive customer demand. Nayak argued that Google's search results are of higher quality than those of Microsoft's Bing. Interestingly, Google has started comparing itself to TikTok, with CEO Sundar Pichai stating that competition can come from unexpected places. TikTok recently began testing Google results in its search pages, a move reminiscent of Twitter's previous partnership with Google.
Key takeaways:
- Pandu Nayak, a vice president for search at Google, testified about Google's efforts to maintain search quality in the U.S. antitrust trial, countering arguments about payments to Apple and smartphone makers to keep Google as the default search engine.
- Insider Intelligence predicts that Google will remain the dominant player in worldwide search ad revenue in 2023, with $140.97 billion, which is 57.4% of the global search ad market. Google's market share of search without advertising is estimated at 90%.
- Google CEO Sundar Pichai stated that the company's real competition is not other search engines like Bing or Yahoo, but rather platforms like TikTok, which has rapidly gained popularity as a marketing tool despite being banned on federal and state phones in the U.S.
- Search rankings also rely on RankBrain, part of Google’s core algorithm that uses machine learning to determine the most relevant results to search engine queries. This system, launched in 2015, was the first deep learning system deployed in Search.