For over the past two decades, Google Search has been the guiding light to information. And all this while, the service worked well for the company but now the Mountain View-based company may have to pay a price since the antitrust case hit the courts.

Microsoft’s CEO was called for an hour-long questioning by the justice department for the ongoing trial against Google. “You get up in the morning, you brush your teeth, and you search on Google,” Satya Nadella testified in a packed courtroom in Washington on Monday in the landmark US antitrust case against Google. “With that level of habit forming, the only way to change is by changing defaults,” he suggested. 

In February, Nadella had portrayed Bing as a “new day” in search during its rollout, now admitting that his “exuberance” stemmed from the hope of increasing Bing’s modest 3% market share. However, as of August, this modest goal remains unachieved.

The Redmond giant saw an uptick of roughly 16% on page visits to Bing since the launch of its GPT-4-powered “new Bing”. In its early days, “co-pilot” did draw in a considerable number of new users, as Microsoft itself confirmed that Bing had surpassed 100 million active users for the first time in February 2023. 

Despite Microsoft’s $10 billion agreement with OpenAI, aimed at challenging Google’s dominance in search, the latter continues to reign supreme in the search space as of August.

Keeping Alternatives Afloat

While Nadella was on the witness stand, judge Amit Mehta seemed intent on finding out more “about whether a startup could use innovation in artificial intelligence to wrest market share from Google”, the WSJ reported.

Star witness Nadella claimed that Microsoft has invested more than Google has in search and that in some ways, Microsoft’s investments have been one of the only things keeping some search alternatives afloat. Contrarily, in March 2023 as the AI war was heating up, without disclosing the names, the Windows maker had warned two Bing-powered search engines threatening to prohibit their access to Microsoft’s search data if they use it to power their AI tools.

Before a search engine can hope to make a run against Google, it has to crawl. Smaller privacy-centric search engines like DuckDuckGo, Neeva and Brave need an index of the web. Many sites don’t welcome any web crawler that isn’t Google or Bing hence they are dependent primarily on the tech giants.  

“Quite frankly, the investments Microsoft has made in search have even kept all the other search players who contend for it, like a DuckDuckGo, going because they use our search index,” Nadella said. 

While Nadella stands corrected, he missed out an important piece of detail. Last year DDG got into a tracking controversy leading the company to amend terms with Microsoft, its search syndication partner.

The Microsoft chief also contended that due to Google’s grip on mobile providers and browsers’ default search placements, the notion of users having real choices in selecting a search engine is “bogus”. 

Agreeably, not just startups, but Microsoft has also struggled to maintain healthy relations with the iPhone maker, Apple. In an attempt to replace Google Search (the default search engine for all Apple devices), back in 2020, the Nadella-run company tried to sell its Bing search engine to the Cupertino-giant.

AI Panic

On the witness box, Nadella also said there might be limits to how much new AI applications can reshape the market. This is true since Microsoft has tried every AI tactic to overcome Google’s dominance —yet remains way behind the Sundar Pichai-led firm. 

Microsoft’s AI investments, thanks to OpenAI’s aid, did cause Google to panic and announce a code red. Reportedly, Alphabet even forced a collaboration between Google’s Brain AI group and DeepMind and reorganised its Assistant team in hopes of focusing more on its AI chatbot Bard. Still, the homegrown Bard has not been able to match the popularity of ChatGPT. 

In the recent past, Google has devised radical changes to its Search by including AI features and revamping its privacy policy, too. Despite being initially spurred by Microsoft’s increasing AI strength, Google has remained steadfast in its position as the search giant, unaffected by AI innovations. 

Hence, Nadella’s latest statements hold importance on ways the future of search is going to shape and whether Google will continue to dominate the internet.