Scene: the General Court of the EU in Luxembourg. Topic: the (alleged?) Google monopoly in the field of internet search. The atmosphere, we imagine, will have been in keeping with the length, the themes, the present. But then, with an unpredictable irony, a fact comes out that can’t help but make you smile: the most searched term on the Bing search engine is Google.
For those who are not familiar with the question, a brief review will be useful. On the one hand, there is Google, which is trying to avoid or at least reduce the largest antitrust fine ever imposed by the European Union: 4.3 billion euros. It was established in 2018, when the big American was accused of abuse of dominant position, for having forced the producers of smartphones with the Android operating system to have the Mountain View apps preloaded.
CEO Sundar Pichai wrote a well-thought-out post on the company’s official blog to explain the business model that has allowed Android to become the most popular mobile operating system in the world, underlining how this has created more choice and more choice for companies and individuals. less. Pichai argued that Android users could easily switch to another search engine if they preferred, for example, Bing or Brave over Google’s search engine preloaded on Android smartphones (but beware, even on iPhones it’s the same, for a deal with Apple renewed from year to year).
The fact that Google collects more than 85 percent of search engine traffic worldwide, Pichai continued, is only because its users have chosen Google over its competitors. This is also because the company has invested enormous resources to dominate research since the early days of the internet. By 2000, the company had already indexed more sites than any other search engine at the time. And it continues to add features and explore new ways to make searches even more precise and complete, as seen in the latest Search On event.
So, if in theory the alternatives exist, from DuckDuckGo to Brave, from Qwant, up to Bing, in reality the results offered by other search engines are at best less numerous than those offered by Google. And often even less useful.
Google’s lawyer Alfonso Lamadrid then took up Pichai’s argument, almost verbatim repeated that “people use Google because they choose to do so, not because they are forced”. Except then add that on Bing, which collects just 5.56% of searches on the web, “the evidence shows that the most common query is by far Google”. On the one hand it sounds like a joke: you go to Microsoft’s engine to look for the competitor. On the other hand, it is a fact that is unlikely to relieve Google of the allegations of abuse of dominant position, indeed, if anything, it will strengthen them.
.