Google thrives because it indexes unfathomable amounts of information across the web and processes several billion queries a day-queries that are aided in part by what the company describes as “aggregated and anonymized interaction data” from its users. The laws of network effects state that users beget more users, that those users shed data that are helpful in personalizing and streamlining the user experience. Scale means everything to Silicon Valley and the venture-capital firms that fuel its start-ups-including Google, in its early years. The DOJ has argued that having access to user data such as web history and past searches (the kind that are easier to collect when you’re the default browser on millions of phones) is like “oxygen for a search engine” Google plans to argue that, although user data can improve search quality, “there are diminishing returns to scale.” search-engine market because its technology is superior and users genuinely prefer it, or because it paid massive sums to companies like Apple to be used as a default service over competitors such as Bing? In its opening days, the trial has hinged on arguments about the importance of data. It all feels less like a midlife crisis than an existential one.Īt the heart of the case against Google is a simple question: Does the company command 90 percent of the U.S.

Over the next several weeks, the Justice Department and a group of states will argue that the company violated antitrust laws by striking deals to protect its monopoly position in the online-search business. The company is on trial and scrambling internally to maintain relevance in the generative-AI era. It’s fitting, then, that as the shine has worn off, Google has also found itself in an unusual moment of vulnerability. Using Google once felt like magic, and now it’s more like rifling through junk mail, dodging scams and generic mailers. Bring on the meat!”), and endless, keyword-engorged content. It’s harder now to find answers that feel authoritative or uncompromised a search for healthy toddler snacks is overloaded with sponsored product placement, prompts to engage with “more questions” ( How do you fill a hungry toddler? “Meat and Seafood. Unlike its streamlined, efficient former self, Google Search is now bloated and overmonetized. It is also, like the modern web, creaking under the weight of its enormous size and an infinitely renewable supply of content, both human- and AI-generated. It is Moviefone and the stock ticker, a well-trained chatbot, an image repository, a shopping mall. It is part encyclopedia and part predictive engine, guessing what you might be typing or thinking, serving information based on what others before you typed. Today, Google isn’t just an index to help sort through the endless libraries of online information-it’s a reference guide for the physical world too, having mapped most corners of the Earth and cataloged its contents. What is Google Search in 2023? A site that started 25 years ago as a list of blue links has mutated beyond recognition.

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