Will You Still Google in the Future?
The word Google is synonymous with browsing the internet, but with more search results being handed over to advertisements, will that last?
Home of search.
Photo by: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg
How many times do you “Google” a day? How about a year? Rough estimates put the number of searches that Google processes at more than 2 trillion per year and, worldwide, it has a search engine market share of more than 90%. We enjoy Google’s search bar for free, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a cost. It just means we are the product.
Bloomberg Opinion columnist Parmy Olson spoke with former Google advertising chief Sridhar Ramaswamy on a Twitter Spaces about the company’s ad model, the intrusive nature of browsing the web and why Google still rules internet search. Ramaswamy was at Google for 15 years, and for the last five years, ran the company’s all important advertising division. He left in 2018 and has since co-founded a competing search engine, Neeva, which makes money through a monthly subscription. Here is a lightly edited transcription of their conversation.