If we reinvent search now, it could break Google’s monopoly in the future

The internet turns 53 this year and it has been profoundly shaped by Big Tech companies, including my previous employer, Google.

With the Internet reaching middle age, Google currently controls an incredible amount of the world’s access to information on the Internet. Users around the world seem to be getting “free content” all the time; however, there is a hidden fee for this content provided by a company with over 90% market share.

Google’s success in search advertising and its relentless focus on driving advertising across the web has created a toxic web environment where everything we do is monitored. What we do during a search and even beyond is packaged and used for advertising, and it’s extremely difficult to separate the authentic and reliable from the flashy and deceptive.

But searching doesn’t have to be like that. Consumers and businesses alike can benefit from a tailored web experience that provides genuinely helpful answers to queries, not advertisers making the bargains they want to sell today.

Here’s how we’re reinventing web search.

Reduce ad noise by subscribing to an alternative search model

Subscription services have undoubtedly benefited from the pandemic. People signed up en masse to Netflix, Disney+ and others. Meanwhile, premium publishers have put most of their content behind a paywall. People have become accustomed to subscription services, as it extends not only to entertainment, but also to fitness classes, home cooking kits, software, skin care – the list goes on. The takeaway from the growth of the subscription economy: people want products that provide the best experience them and not a persona Google created based on their buying preferences.

Web searches should be no different. After all, it’s how we access knowledge, and it shapes our opinion.

A search subscription model would make ads obsolete. With no advertisers happy, the focus shifts back to users, meaning businesses can focus on making search experiences more accurate and intuitive. Users pay a small monthly fee in exchange for unbiased search results and a product where privacy becomes the de facto basis; that’s good news for everyone.

However, moving to a subscription model at scale and banning ads on the search network is certainly not without its challenges. That’s why Google still has a monopoly on web search today. But neither is it a dystopian future beyond our reach.

Search engines should be about choice and discovery

One of the biggest obstacles in realizing a subscription-based search model is making it easy for users to switch to an alternative.

Users deserve real choice and competitors deserve fair and equitable access to the market, not the bare minimum that Google believes meets regulatory oversight. Android’s “choice” screen, for example, only updates once a year and actively buries alternatives with ad-funded Google clones. And even as users seek and find alternatives, monopolies like Google abuse their market share to introduce anti-competitive practices such as misleading directions and shady patterns to trick users into returning to walled gardens.

And just as alternatives fail to compete on a level playing field for awareness and choice among potential users, they also run up against the circular saw of Google’s dominance over webmasters when it comes to building an independent search engine. The web is a hostile environment for most novice search engine crawlers, with most websites allowing only Google’s crawler and discriminating against other search engine crawlers.

Without a change in policy and behavior, competitors in search will continue to fight with one hand tied behind their backs, and Google will maintain market dominance. This is not only bad news for companies that rival Big Tech or users, but also for democracy itself.

Embrace control and make search more difficult for users and SMEs

While policy changes are needed to create a level playing field, the way to fundamentally improve web search for users is to give them back control rather than serving cookie-based content.

This form of web search essentially puts the end user second. While this can be effective for superficial one-click searches, it can result in poor quality results for objective or in-depth searches.

Search engines of the future must be more focused on the user experience and the tailored needs of users and businesses. Enabling users to choose which trusted sources to get information from, such as an academic archive or a news source, delivers more relevant, higher quality information.

This is a positive for publishers as it means high-quality content is prioritized based on its own merit rather than ranked based on who pays the most. And it gives customers more control over their search and more confidence in their web search engine.

A new model that puts users in control and eliminates the misaligned incentives of an advertising model also ends Google’s burden of paying small businesses to keep their name at the top of search results and thus top of mind for users. Instead of bidding on their own brand name to prevent competitors from bidding more to claim that demand, companies can focus more on their products and differentiate themselves in the market. And users are presented with more relevant results instead of subpar companies playing the advertising and bidding systems.

A new look at search for businesses

When you don’t sell data and users have control over their web experience, you build trust with the end user. This trust and respect for the user experience presents an opportunity to challenge the traditional parameters of what it means to search for knowledge. For example, extending the ability to search seamlessly across all your digital content, from email to Dropbox, Slack, and Jira, creates an even more valuable search experience.

For businesses, this can save countless hours of searching through documents and apps to find the information they’re looking for. This promotes employee productivity and efficiency and provides so many other benefits. But it starts with trust and putting users back in control; without it, it’s groundhog day on the web.

Moving away from “googling everything” and reinventing web search for good will require a significant shift from all stakeholders on the internet. That means a change in behavior for everyone, not just the engineers building the technology to change the status quo.

Users must demand control over their data and user experiences; regulators need to level the playing field and welcome competition to match Google’s monopoly, and users and businesses need to view search as a service rather than a no-strings-attached way to receive free content and knowledge.

Any model that wants to beat Google needs to put the user at the center and create a truly better search experience. Being private or ad-free doesn’t go far enough.

If this happens, we could really be looking at Goliath vs. David 2.0 and a way to finally break Google’s monopoly.

Sridhar Ramaswarmy is CEO and co-founder of Neeva.