Often the answer is just a click or an app away: You can ask Alexa a question from your kitchen; read your news on Twitter; ask friends for information on WhatsApp; and get recommendations on Instagram and Pinterest. We face robust competition from an array of sources, including general and specialized search engines, as well as dedicated apps. Independent parties estimate that 55 percent of people in the U.S. start product searches on Amazon, not Google. And many online shoppers use Walmart, eBay and other sites. For travel searches, many people go to Expedia, Kayak, Orbitz and TripAdvisor.
For queries where we make money by showing ads—typically those queries with commercial intent—competition is particularly intense.
Improving Search
We make changes to Search to create a better experience for people. We constantly test and refine our systems, using feedback from search raters across the country and the world to measure the quality of our results. We test hundreds of thousands of potential changes each year, and launch those that make Search more useful. In closing an extensive investigation into Google Search, a bipartisan Federal Trade Commission found that our product changes were designed to “improve the quality” of search results and “likely benefited consumers.”
Our testing has consistently shown that people want quick access to information, so over the years we’ve developed new ways to organize and display results. For example, we’ve built features to show maps to people searching for directions; sample menus to people looking for a restaurant; prices and options to people looking to buy products, take a flight or find a job; and quick answers for people asking for the local time, a calculation or a unit conversion.
Search results and rankings
Just like content on the web, Search is dynamic, and websites’ rankings will rise and fall over time based on a number of factors including freshness and relevance. We drive billions of visits to sites across the web every day, and the volume of traffic we've sent to the open web has increased every year since Search was created. As we’ve developed more helpful features to organize different types of information—from images and videos to local results—we’ve also grown the average number of outbound links to websites on a search results page, from only 10 (“10 blue links”) to now an average of 26 links on mobile.
Google is an important way for smaller merchants and businesses to compete with larger competitors. On average, local results in Search drive more than 4 billion connections for businesses every month, including website clicks, phone calls, directions, food orders and reservations. And every month, Search connects people with more than 120 million businesses that don’t have a website.
Our tools help those businesses optimize how their sites perform in Search and control information that appears on our Search results page. Site owners have the control to tell our web crawler (Googlebot) what pages we should crawl and index, and they even have more granular controls to indicate which portions of a page should appear as a text snippet on Google Search. Using our developer tools, site creators can choose if they want to be discovered via Google and optimize their sites to improve how they’re presented, with the aim to get more free traffic from people looking for the information and services they’re offering.
Android
We offer Android, our open-source operating system, to device makers and carriers for free, which lowers the cost consumers pay for mobile devices. The Android model has created more choice for phone makers, app developers and billions of consumers who can now afford and use an array of cutting-edge smartphones available at every price point, including some as low as $50. Today, because of Android, there are more than 1,300 brands, 500 operators and 1.3 million app developers offering their content to global users on 2 billion devices.
Choice has always been a core tenet of Android, and it’s why consumers have always had control over which apps they use—including their keyboard, messaging app and phone system.
The same is true of app stores: Android has always allowed people to choose which app store to use. In fact, most Android devices come with at least two app stores, and consumers can install additional app stores if they’d like to. Developers can also negotiate directly with device makers or carriers to preload their apps on Android devices and consumers can download apps outside of app stores. Google Play, Google’s online store on Android, is just one of many app stores that Android users can use. This openness means that even if a developer chooses not to distribute through Google Play, they still have many other ways to distribute their apps to Android consumers.
If a developer chooses to distribute their app on Google Play, they can access Play’s app development and optimization tools, discovery options, and distribution capabilities for free. Like many other digital content platforms, however, we charge app developers a service fee in some instances to support Google Play and Android. Google Play developers who sell digital content use Google Play’s billing system for in-app purchases of digital goods, and pay a service fee when users complete a purchase. Because the service fee is only charged when developers charge consumers, Google only makes money when developers make money, thereby aligning our business interests with theirs.
This approach gives consumers a trusted system that allows them to safely, securely and seamlessly buy from developers worldwide. It helps us protect consumers’ payment info with multiple layers of security, using one of the world’s most advanced security infrastructures. And importantly, it enables us to keep investing in Google Play and Android, allowing it to flourish as a platform with more than 2 billion monthly active users.
If a developer prefers not to distribute through Google Play, they can still distribute on Android through any number of competing app stores or directly to consumers—and many do. Developers are also free to communicate with their customers outside of Google Play via email or other channels to inform them of other purchase options and lower cost alternatives, process refunds or provide customer support directly.
Maps
When people are searching for an address or a location, they’re usually looking for information to get around or explore. We’ve launched countless helpful features, including real-time traffic, transit schedules, road closures, popular times, and information about businesses like their hours of operation, menus, reservations, and delivery and curbside pickup options.
We face competition from a wide range of mapping services, including Apple Maps—which is pre-loaded as the default map on iOS devices—Mapbox, Bing, Here Technologies, OpenStreetMap, in-car navigation services, local information providers like Yelp and Tripadvisor, and more. In fact, Facebook recently acquired the street-level mapping company Mapillary as it works to grow its mapping capabilities. People choose to use Google Maps because it provides helpful, high quality information. Over the last five years, Google Maps has been downloaded on the iPhone hundreds of millions of times.
Voice assistants
When it comes to voice assistants, people expect to be able to talk to their devices. Lots of companies preload their own software, including Siri on Apple devices, Alexa on Amazon devices, Bixby on Samsung devices and Google Assistant on many Android devices. Competition in this space is fierce. In fact, Apple recently claimed Siri is the most popular voice assistant in the world and eMarketer estimates that Alexa devices represent 70 percent of the home smart speaker market. Likewise, when it comes to car infotainment systems, there is enormous competition, including Apple CarPlay, Amazon Alexa, Nuance Automotive, and others. More than 500 car models support Apple CarPlay, and more than 200 car models support Alexa.
Other free services
People used to pay large amounts of money for translation services, malware scanning, password managers, navigation systems, patent searches, photo and document storage, word processors, video conferencing and more. We’re proud that our work has made all of those services and tools widely available to everyone for free.
