Why It’s Safe to Pretend that Google is the Only Search Engine

People who talk about search engines act as if Google owns the market. “Don’t do that. Google won’t like it.” “Do that—you’ll rank better on Google.” Google does own a big piece of the market—66% in the US, more in most other places, and it’s a contender even in the few countries where it’s not #1. But it still seems presumptuous to act as if other search engines don’t matter. Bing has a massive engineering team, and is constantly trying to improve their algorithm; Yahoo has its own custom data sets and interface; and independent search engines like Blekko and DuckDuckGo are trying to radically overhaul search.

But it’s almost never worth the mental cycles to think hard about search engine differentiation. Here’s why:

• Smaller search engines are nonentities: Blekko powered 50 million searches in April. That’s an incredible achievement for such a new company. But it’s about .3% of the market. In other words, an incremental 1% improvement in Google traffic is more valuable than the total traffic a site could expect from Blekko.
• Search engines are compelled not to differentiate: Hotelling’s Law is a brilliant articulation of this: in most markets, the rational behavior is for different producers to be as similar as possible. The easiest way to model this is to think of two stores on Main Street. The ideal situation for consumers is for the stores to be spread out, so the average shopper has to travel less to get to any given store. But if the stores decide to do that, and one store moves closer to the center, the number of people who are closer to that particular store goes up, even though the total distance traveled also increases. The optimal solution for the stores is to be located halfway along the street. Hotelling’s Law has lots of explanatory power. It’s a big part of the “clustering” phenomenon, and it probably explains a lot about elections in winner-take-all systems. Search engines are an ideal case study for Hotelling’s Law; it’s simply a better risk-adjusted decision to chase Google rather than doing something too different.
• Google has the data: Search engines make decisions based on data. That means that the search engine that accumulates data fastest makes decisions first. Since Google has higher market share, it will always be able to make statistically valid decisions faster than Bing. This was part of why Bing copied Google’s typo detection: it would take far too long for Bing to develop a corpus of ways to spell “tarsorrhaphy” wrong on its own. (And Bing may be right that they didn’t directly copy Google, but did use user searches and subsequent clicks as an input in their algorithm, even if those searches were on a competing search engine. In a business where algorithms make a lot of decisions, companies end up behaving like very smart, cynical people.)

In the short term, it just doesn’t make sense to talk about “Google and Bing and Ask” when it’s possible to use the “Google” shorthand.