It’s getting tougher and tougher for Google to make believe it’s not the monopolistic bully we all know it to be. Case in point: as part of the firm’s continuing battle to fend off the biggest antitrust fine ever forced by the European Union, the firm claimed in an EU court on Tuesday that it’s the most ever searched for term on Bing’s search engine. Yes, truly!
“We have submitted confirmation showing that the most common search query on Big is by far Google,” Google Lawyer Alfonso Lamadrid told the EU’s General Court in Luxembourg. According to Bloomberg, which reported the first time ever regarding Google’s arguments, Lamadrid went on to note that “people use Google because choose to, not because they are force to do so.”
Sundar Pichai on Google search engine and users
If this dispute sounds conversant, it’s only because nearly equal to the speaking points Google CEO Sundar Pichai used back in 2018, when European controllers first hit the tech giant with a $5billion fine which was the largest ever issued by the European Union. The EU’s grievance alleged that Google had mistreated its Android market supremacy in numerous ways, by bundling its flagship search engine as part of its smartphone operating system.
On the other hand, CEO Pichai saw things differently. In a blog post, he claimed just like Limadrid would argue three years later that Android users could effortlessly switch to another search engine if they wished, say, Big or Brave over the Google search engine that came preloaded on their phone.
No doubt the fact is here that Google grabs more than 90% of the search engine traffic worldwide, according to Pichai, this is only possible because users chose Google over those other competitors, there are no other forces on users to use Google only!
Overall, the reason why most people love to use Google as their primary search engine is that Google is a complete package of tons of resources that offers dominating searches in the early days of the internet. If we will go back to 2000, the company had already indexed more sites than any other search engine in the current time.
According to a report, in 2013, Google had indexed more than 30 trillion web pages. Three years later, the stats just jumped up to 130 trillion pages in total which is a vast number. Those figures are growing day by day. Last year, Gigablast creator Matt Wells told to the New York Times that “If people are on a search engine with a smaller index, they are not always going to get the results they want. And later on, they just visit the Google search engine and stay there. Ultimately, when Google is the default search engine on Android and Apple then it’s obvious that staying in Google web is quite easier.
Procurements of competitors and obvious unethical allegations have been the part and parcel for Google over the last couple of decades and no doubt that’s the reason smaller search engines like Bing have struggled to compete for the mainstream. The situation is so ridiculous that we are sitting here considering a search engine by Microsoft as trash.
Also Read: Google’s Plan to block cookies anti-competitive, advertisers tell EU
