Google is the true internet giant; as of 31st December 2018, the company's revenue was $110 billion, and this resulted in $13 billion NET income. We should also bear in mind that revenue grew at a staggering 17%. The firm continues to expand:
Most of us use some of Google's services on a daily basis, and it is hard not to do it. After all, it owns the most popular web search engine, video search engine, email service, location service, and the most popular operating system for mobile devices in the world.
Pretty much anything they do is not only world-class, but in most cases, best in-class.
There are two main reasons for Google's search dominance. The first one is habit, and the second one is superior data science and AI. Google established itself as the household name in search years ago, and people continue to use it when they need to find information. Moreover, the best way to come up with strong machine learning algorithms is to have a lot of user data in order to shape search results according to a person's preferences. Put simply, Google is able to find results that suit your search better because you've used their search engine in the past.
How could blockchain disrupt Google's search dominance?
It will be very hard to do it, and it will surely take some time. But that's not an impossible scenario. A growing number of platforms are trying to challenge Google's dominance. Privacy-focused search engines that do not sell user data such as DuckDuckGo have a good chance to disrupt the current status quo. But to do that, a search engine such as DuckDuckGo would need some sort of integration with a platform collecting customer data (the so-called identity tokens). Thus, by combining privacy-focused search with a similar quality search experience, users will be happier that one company does not own all of their search queries.
A further incentive is that a decentralized search platform of the future could offer users are tokens. Part of the advertising revenue coming in would serve as a reward for the platform's users. This could be a nice incentive that would help the platform find its first adopters and grow faster. We have seen similar models being implemented by blockchain start-ups such as the Brave browser with its native Basic Attention Token, discussed previously.
YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, and of course the largest video search engine. Competing with YouTube is hard for many of the same reasons it is difficult to compete with Google search. They have tremendous amounts of data and can deliver users the video content they want to see.
However, it is also true that many content creators have been reportedly unhappy with royalties they receive from YouTube. In addition, as of now viewers are not rewarded in any way for the ads they are being shown.
