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novaRom

Fun facts:

* DDG in 2018 has served similar amount of search queries as Google in 2000.

* DDG growth rate is accelerating

* Google search growth rate is negative

* Google's share of global search is shrinking

DDG stats: https://duckduckgo.com/traffic

Google stats: http://www.internetlivestats.com/google-search-statistics/

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I think you're misinterpreting the chart you quoted.

Google search growth rate is always positive in that page. It just decelerated. Growth rate being negative means you're actively losing more users than you gain.

Also, in 2000, the entire Internet had about 10% the number of users it has today (~300M vs around 4B). Still a very impressive number, but the comparison isn't very meaningful.

One argument to be made is that Google Search can only go downwards from here, as it is currently a clear market leader, and the remaining segments are not easy for them to break into. For example, Baidu has a stranglehold on search in China, and that's not likely to change drastically, with Google facing internal opposition to entering China.

This is true, but Google is also adding more search surfaces (e.g., google home, assistant etc.). So, it's possible that they might attract proportionately more users using these surfaces.

I don’t have any Google home devices, but I’d be curious to know how many of those queries are simply commands “Google play my music” and how many are actual internet searches “Google what is the capital of Alabama”.

Another market is Naver in Korea. Although I dont know much about how or why they remain dominant there.

Last I looked at them, they remained dominant because most Korean content on the web was inside Naver's walled garden.

As some point they are caped by the number of people having access and using the Internet, same for Facebook or any world-scale tech company.

I just wish they would drop their featured Yelp results. You too, Bing.

How important to Google is their web search product?

I know it was their first product, but I would imagine they get much of their revenue from other avenues, such as Android's built-in totally-not-antitrust web search app, and YouTube and Gmail and web ads...

I haven’t looked at their annual report recently, but back in 2016, advertisement made up a majority of their revenues and profits — around 90% if I recall correctly. I’d be willing to bet that keyword advertisements on search make up a larger portion of that traffic than that through YouTube videos.

Web Search is still Google's unicorn but it is not as much profitable as few years ago mostly because there now better advertising channels like social nets and online videos. Many people today also use price comparison apps instead of web search.

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