This week, our trial with the Division of Justice and State Attorneys Common got here to an finish. After 10 weeks, the proof confirms what we’ve mentioned all alongside: Folks have many selections when looking for data on-line, they usually use Google as a result of it’s useful.
Listed here are our key takeaways from the trial:
Our success is because of our fixed dedication to innovation and high quality.
All through the trial, we heard testimony on the various methods Google continuously innovates in Search to create a greater expertise for our customers. As our VP of Search High quality, Pandu Nayak, mentioned on the stand, “there’s no sense that Search has ever been adequate.” That’s why we make investments billions in R&D yearly and have pioneered developments in machine studying and synthetic intelligence. By comparability, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella confirmed that Microsoft’s “failure to make capital expenditures to help its search enterprise” was not as a result of they lacked the sources, and that in 2018, Google Search’s engineering group was 5 occasions larger than Bing’s. And DuckDuckGo’s CEO testified that it has distributed capital to shareholders a number of occasions, reasonably than investing in bettering its search engine.
Our funding in cellular was the proper name on the proper time.
Our former VP of Search, Ben Gomes, testified that in 2007, our founders instructed a “mobile-only” strategy to innovating and bettering Search. The Court docket heard how this was a chance, since cellular queries had been a small fraction of whole queries and the overwhelming majority of searches nonetheless occurred on desktop. Google’s investments and improvements to advance cellular computing and Search on cellular units — together with the launch of the open-source Android working system and the Android cellular software distribution and income share agreements — made us probably the most engaging accomplice to cellular gadget makers like Samsung. As our CEO Sundar Pichai testified, these firms wished to present their customers “important out-of-the-box performance.” In contrast, a Microsoft govt testified that they didn’t even launch a cellular browser till 2017 and failed in numerous efforts to develop a aggressive cellular platform.
We compete for promotion to make Search simply accessible, however individuals can simply discover alternate options.
As Sundar mentioned, “We need to make it very, very seamless and simple for customers to make use of our service.” We compete for promotional alternatives so individuals can simply entry Search and so that individuals search extra. Our revenue-sharing funds have elevated over time as a result of persons are looking out extra with Google, having fun with the advantages of unbelievable improvements in our companions’ cellular units and browsers. However simply being the default doesn’t assure success, as a result of customers know find out how to discover the alternate options they like. For instance, although Microsoft preloads Edge and Bing, and places up obstacles to switching, the massive majority of Home windows customers search with Google. Satya Nadella testified that Bing’s share of search queries on Home windows is “within the teenagers.” We additionally discovered that when Bing was the default on Blackberry and Home windows Cell cellular units, nearly all of searches nonetheless went to Google. Mozilla’s CEO, Mitchell Baker, testified that once they modified the default on Firefox to Yahoo!, “we discovered our customers making an attempt all types of various methods to get again to Google, and we skilled a number of individuals leaving Firefox.”
Our companions select us as a result of they are saying we’re the perfect.
Apple’s Eddy Cue testified: “Once we had been doing the cope with Google, we wished the capabilities to supply the perfect — the perfect service, the perfect software, the perfect factor for patrons. Google was the perfect one.” Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker mentioned, “Our customers made it clear that they search for and need and anticipate Google, and that once they get Google Search outcomes and Google because the default, that’s what they anticipate, they usually’re pleased.” And Motorola’s Erik Christensen agreed that preloading Chrome and Google Search on Motorola telephones was within the “finest curiosity of…its customers.”
Google has many opponents, not simply common search engines like google and yahoo.
Proof at trial reveals we face fierce competitors from a broad vary of opponents — from specialised search engines like google and yahoo like Expedia, Angi and Yelp to social-media companies like Instagram, Fb and TikTok. As Prabhakar Raghavan, our SVP of Data and Info, mentioned, “We really feel ourselves competing with them day-after-day.” Economist Dr. Mark Israel testified that “every question made by a consumer is a meaningfully distinct alternative about the place to go [to] get data. Amazon competes for procuring queries, Expedia competes for journey queries and Yelp competes for native queries.” We compete for all of those queries and innovate day-after-day so customers will select Google for his or her data wants.
Scale will not be almost the entire story.
Specialists and our prime engineers testified the DOJ overstates the worth of click-and-query information.
A number of of our prime engineers testified that there are lots of vital features of search high quality that require little or no click-and-query information, together with latest improvements in massive language fashions and constructing a complete index of the online. (In truth, Microsoft’s head of search and promoting testified that one in every of Bing’s main challenges was that its net index has traditionally been far smaller than Google’s and didn’t put money into increasing it till 2019.) And the founding father of Neeva testified that he believed one solely wants 2.5% of customers to have a aggressive common search engine.
When the DOJ filed their lawsuit over three years in the past, we mentioned its case was deeply flawed. During the last ten weeks, we introduced the information to again this up. We recognize the chance to inform our aspect of the story and stay up for persevering with to make our case within the post-trial proceedings.
