Study aims to pinpoint reason behind Google’s search dominance

Between the rise of AI-powered competitors and a landmark antitrust ruling, Google has faced unprecedented threats to its search dominance in recent months. And yet people are still googling, for now—the tech giant remains the No. 1 player in the search space.

As the courts are set to decide on how to break Google’s search stranglehold, a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) takes a look at some of the factors that have sustained Google’s market power for the past couple decades.

The researchers recruited more than 2,000 people and studied their search habits for a period of two weeks, offering certain segments cash rewards to switch to Microsoft Bing or asking others to make an active choice rather than sticking with a default engine.

The authors found that users who were paid to switch to Bing had a more positive opinion of its quality after the two weeks were up, and a third even chose to continue using it. Removing Google as a default option and forcing users to choose only increased Bing’s share by 1.1%, however.

When Bing was made the default search option for a certain segment of the group, many didn’t bother to switch to Google, suggesting that a certain portion of search market share is driven by consumers not paying much attention to which search engine they use, the authors wrote.

Overall, the researchers concluded that if people had a fully accurate view of each search engine’s quality and if the inconvenience of switching between them were removed, Bing would have a 15% larger market share than it does now.

What it means: The study comes as a court is set to decide on how to deal with what a judge has deemed Google’s illegal monopoly over the search market. The Department of Justice has proposed a number of fixes, including Google spinning off its Chrome browser, ending default search agreements with companies like Apple, and sharing data with rivals for 10 years.

NBER said its study suggests that this kind of data sharing “may only have a minor effect on market shares.” The researchers conclude that defaults do play a role, but recommend policies that incentivize web surfers to actually try Bing and other alternatives to correct “overly pessimistic” beliefs about their quality.