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Google's Grip on Search Slips as TikTok and AI Startup Mount Challenge (yahoo.com) 17

Google's grip on the nearly $300 billion search advertising business is loosening. From a report: For years, the tech giant has seemed invincible in this corner of the ad market, which is the foundation of its business. Now, rivals are beginning to eat into its lead, and new offerings -- fueled by the rise of artificial intelligence and social video -- threaten to reshape the landscape. TikTok, the wildly popular short-form video platform, has recently started allowing brands to target ads based on users' search queries -- a direct challenge to Google's core business.

Perplexity, an AI search startup backed by Jeff Bezos, plans to introduce ads later this month under its AI-generated answers. Until now, it has made revenue mostly from a $20-a-month subscription offering that grants access to more-powerful AI technology. The new initiatives add to the pressure on Google from the rise of Amazon.com, which has taken a chunk of search ad spending. Many consumers begin product searches on the e-commerce platform.

Google's share of the U.S. search ad market is expected to drop below 50% next year for the first time in over a decade, according to the research firm eMarketer. Amazon is expected to have 22.3% of the market this year, with 17.6% growth, compared with Google's 50.5% share and its 7.6% growth.

Google's Grip on Search Slips as TikTok and AI Startup Mount Challenge

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  • If you use Bing with Cortana, it can often find things better than Google. Partially because Google sold out to the SEO crowd.
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      If you use Bing with Cortana, it can often find things better than Google. Partially because Google sold out to the SEO crowd.

      Google sold out to the SEO crowd? Google created the SEO crowd, promoted the SEO ideology every step of the way, and is now an SEO evangelist, ranking in tech territory about where Jimmy Swaggart ranked for TV evangelists at one time. Right around the time he got busted doing naked chinese firedrills with hookers.

  • Back in the days, Google would just find relevant stuff crawling the web, in these days where SEO wasn't a thing. Now, if you have great info but no SEO skills, you'll be on the 16th page in the results and get no hit on your great info.

    AI is getting relevant, cause it gets (mostly) good answers to questions, compared to Google, where answers are getting more and more sponsored, and less relevant.

    As for TikTok, AKA the PRC, I can't say, I will never let that shit in my home on smartphone. Just as Temu.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      Back in the days, Google would just find relevant stuff crawling the web, in these days where SEO wasn't a thing

      SEO has been around longer than Google. SEO has been around almost as long as there have been search engines to manipulate, and there were plenty of search engines before Google. The first recorded use of the term "Search Engine Optimisation" was in 1997, although it was likely in use well before that, and the techniques were in use before they had a name. Google wasn't founded until 1998.

  • If you need a question answered, Google is pretty good at that.

    If you need to search the web, unfortunately Google hasn't done a good job at that in over a decade.

  • AI that can search, cite, and link while integrating information by relevance to the query is obviously vastly superior to Google search.

    Similarly, however, AI that gets to know the user and his/her needs/interests and projects could be a bastion for business IF the AI company charges to list their products. The key to win would be to offer more information about the products thereby enabling the AI to determine what products meet the user's actual needs.

    When I say products here, it also applies to service

  • Ages ago, IBM was in the cash register market, and had to find new markets to keep going, thus being one of the first companies into the computer ecosystem. Maybe Google needs to start moving into other markets? The ad market isn't going to keep expanding, and it is only a matter of time, either due to nationalism, worry about intel gathering, increased concern about privacy, and people just sick and tired of ad companies, that the market is going to shrink, especially because the ad market likely will im

  • Google's grip on the nearly $300 billion search advertising business..

    A search advertising business that was reduced to half a dozen results on the first page only, because society embraced ADHD as some kind of personal mantra.

    Ask any company with second-page search results if they think that’s worth $300 billion.

  • Anyway

  • Regular searching has become such garbage these days. Ten years ago, I could look up a fact and be sure to find it in the first few results. Now, there are 1000 spam sites for every real site, and the number of spam sites keeps growing thanks to better and better (or worse and worse) AI tools.

    Now we need AI to sort through the AI spam. The overall result is worse than what we used to get, thanks to hallucinations and the AI slurping up the good with the bad. Eventually, we're going to all buy copies of

  • Under pressure to meet its quarterly profits, Google has elected to flood search results with ads and "custom" results that keep the user engaged, instead of results that are relevant, the criterion that made them so huge. Now that search is a commodity, any number of other companies who do not need to generate ungodly profits every quarter can make good money by providing relevant results. Ecosia, DuckDuckGo, Bing, and any other number of search engines provide the traditional experience that makes them us

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