After Google Ruled a Monopoly, Search for Alternatives Heats Up
Emerging search engine alternatives include categories of AI-powered, revenue-sharing, copyright-free, privacy-focused, knowledge-based and specialized
By John P. Desmond, Editor, AI in Business
“Google is a monopolist,” rang out Judge Amit Mehta, the district court judge who on August 5 handed down a 286-page ruling after a four-year proceeding. He added, “It has acted as one.”
Google’s primary business model is to make money on advertising, doing so by handling 90 percent of search queries in America, including 95 percent of those on mobile fonts. Google pays to have its search engine be the default option on many platforms, coming to $26 billion in 2021, according to an account in The Economist.
What’s the upshot? The Economist account authors consider it most likely that the court will rule consumers should be presented with a choice of search tools. That would put search engine alternatives to Google in a position to gain. Here we look at the landscape of search engine alternatives to Google.
A recent account in Search Engine Journal offers examples in these useful categories: AI-powered search engines (Bing, Perplexity.ai, You.com); a revenue-sharing search engine (Yep.com); a copyright-free search engine (Openverse); mainstream search engines (Yahoo, Ecosia, AOL,); privacy-focused search engines (DuckDuckGo, Startpage, Swisscows, Gibiru, Brave); knowledge-based search engines (Wiki.com, SlideShare, Wayback Machine); specialized search engines (WolframAlpha, LinkedIn); and international search engines (Baidu, Yandex, Sogou, Naver).
To look at a few, Perplexity.ai, founded in 2022, has 10 million monthly active users, according to the account, authored by Chuck Price, the founder and CEO of Measurable SEO. Perplexity.ai surfaces as a chatbot that answers questions by citing sources for its information, and an option to ask followup questions. “This interactive approach mimics a conversational style, making it easier for users to refine their search and get more precise answers,” stated the author.
He quoted Tobi Ḽ̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̋̏̏utke, the CEO of Shopify, as commenting that Perplexity.ai “has definitely replaced my Google usage for now. It’s pretty incredible.” On the downside, the product relies on large-language models, which are prone to hallucinations that can result in unreliable answers.
You.com was founded by Richard Socher, a natural language processing researcher and former chief scientist at Salesforce. The site operates in a personal mode and a private mode. Users configure their source preferences in personal mode; in private mode, their experience is untraceable. “The platform encourages developers to build apps and contribute to a more open and collaborative internet,” Price wrote.
In an interview with CerebralValley.ai, Socher said when ChatGPT came out, it helped his business because it raised the awareness of alternatives to using Google for search. Resistance to search alternatives began to subside.
“The unlock helped people realize they could search in a different way, moving away from a list of blue links,” Socher stated. “We quickly adapted.” Within two weeks, You.com released a version that connects its LLM to the web and included citations for results. “As amazing as LLMs are, they do hallucinate and can’t be trained with constantly updating news articles,” he stated. Also, most LLMs, “don’t specify where the facts came from.”
Sharing With Users Is a Trend
Yep.com offers to share revenue with providers of original internet content, 90 percent to the content originator and 10 percent to Yep. It does not compile a personal profile for the purpose of targeted advertising.
Microsoft’s Bing handles 7.1 percent of all search queries in the US. It has a rewards program that allows a user to accumulate points while searching. These are redeemable at the Microsoft and Windows stores. (It’s like accumulating points for shopping at the grocery store that can be redeemed for discounts on gas for the car.)
Openverse finds copyright-free content, including access to a vast, searchable collection of open-source media, including images, audio and videos. “This search engine is perfect if you need music for a video, an image for a blog post, or anything else without worrying about angry artists coming after you for ripping off their work,” stated Price.
In the takeaway for the piece, Price stated, “Alternative search engines can offer a wide range of benefits, including a better search experience and higher levels of privacy … Do yourself a favor and give some of these a try.”
Brave Based on Chromium
Brave is a free and open-source web browser developed by Brave Software and based on the Chromium web browser, which is developed and maintained by Google. Brave is a privacy-focused browser, which In its default settings, automatically blocks most ads and website trackers.
Is this Google committing suicide for its browser business? To base a privacy-based browser on code from Google, which makes most of its money selling data from users of its browsers without clearly getting permission, “sounds like an oxymoron,” one commenter on Reddit stated. Another said, “the open source nature of Chromium gives me some comfort.”
The Brave website offers a comparison of Chrome versus Brave. It says in part: “Chrome is built for tracking. It allows creepy ads, trackers, cookies, and more to follow you across the Web, record everything you do, and link that activity directly with you. All without your knowledge or consent,” Also, Brave, meanwhile, is private by default.”
Brave offers a rewards program, Brave Rewards, that enables users of the browser to earn Basic Attention Tokens for ads they see in Brave. The user selects which kinds of Brave ads they agree to see and earn from, such as images on a new tab page, or push notifications. Content creators can be supported by the user identifying favorite sites and creators, or the user can ask Brave to make creator selections automatically.
“Unlike ads from Big Tech companies, Brave Ads are private and never profile you. Your browsing data never leaves your device,” the company states on its website.
Advertisers execute campaigns on Brave. A case study about a campaign run by the Chipotle restaurant chain, resulted in a 34 percent cost per conversion improvement on the day of the campaign’s start, called a new tab takeover.
Brave delivers a different audience than Google. “Brave’s audience is tech-savvy and hard to reach with traditional digital ads–because they used the ad-blocking Brave browser, and because they’re less likely to use social media and paid cable or satellite TV,” according to the case study.
Tor Anonymizes Web Use
Finally, the Tor browser is a web browser that anonymizes the user, enabling protection of his or her identity online. Short for The Onion Router, Tor was developed and is maintained by the Tor Project. It was first developed in the mid-1990s by several employees of the US Naval Research Laboratory, to protect the identities of US Navy intelligence agents. The onion routing principle was invented by Paul Syverson and was later released for free public use.
“If you’re investigating a competitor, researching an opposing litigant in a legal dispute, or just think it’s creepy for your ISP or the government to know what websites you visit, then the Tor Browser might be the right solution for you,” states the author of a recent account in CSO Online, J.M. Porup.
Its users may include whistleblowers, journalists, citizens of autocratic regimes, IT professionals, executives, lawyers, military professionals, and many others who need to have their work communications and activities cloaked for a variety of reasons, including investigating competitors and keeping strategies confidential, according to the account.
Tor was released for Android in 2019; it is not yet available for iPhone or IPad platforms.
In some countries, Tor is blocked by national authorities, including China. “Countries such as Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran are working hard to prevent citizens from using Tor. Most recently, Venezuela has blocked all Tor traffic,” Porup stated.
“It’s easy to see why a repressive regime hates Tor. The service makes it easy for journalists to report on corruption and helps dissidents organize against political repression,” he stated.
Read the source articles and information in The Economist, Search Engine Journal, CerebralValley.ai and CSO Online.