Last week, a federal judge ruled that Google was illegally maintaining monopoly over Internet search and was using its dominance to squash the competition.

Google announced that it was planning to appeal this ruling and was “focused on making products that people find helpful and easy to use.”

Before I opinion on what would be the ramifications by this antitrust ruling on the hospitality industry, let me ask the following question: What do WebCrawler, Yahoo Search, LookSmart, Alta Vista, Lycos, Excite, Dogpile, Inktomi, Ask Jeeves, Alltheweb, Caffeine and Apple Search have in common?

These all were search engines that dominated Internet search at one point or another, most pre-dated Google and some of them had first movers advantage, and many challenged Google for dominance after it emerged. They all failed.

Why? Not because Google acquired them to increase market share. Simply because Internet users fell in love with Google search and preferred it to all other search engines.

So we are talking about dominance in search due to Google’s superior technology and talent, not because of some evil monopolistic ambitions.

So, what will be the impact of this latest antitrust ruling on travel and hospitality?

• Short term: no impact. Business as usual. The current ruling and anticipated appeals by Google will take years to pan out. One way or another.

• Mid Term: Google’s exclusive contracts to provide search on a number of Internet platforms and websites will be revised (Apple, etc.) to make them non-exclusive. But where would one find a better alternative search engine?

• Long Term: The search space is already being populated by an increasing number of generative AI search engines like OpenAI Search engine, Anthropic’s Claude, etc., so consumers will have plenty of search options to choose from. Will these new AI-powered search engines have the deep pockets to finance an undertaking like this one and the tech talent to execute it?Will they have the market acumen and persistence to establish new search products in the marketplace? Remains to be seen.

The question is, how many Internet users will abandon Google and switch to another gen AI-powered search engine? Google gets 82 billion visits per month! YouTube - another 31 billion. ChatGPT? A paltry 3 billion!

Even today online consumers have the choice to abandon Google and switch to least 15 other search engines like Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Ask, AOL, Yep, Brave Search, Andi, You, etc., not counting the regional Baidu, Naver and Yandex.

How many users have done it? In mid 2024, Google held 91.47% of the global search market share across all devices, while Bing held 3.43%, Yandex: 1.78% and Yahoo!: 1.1%.

Ultimately, the free market and consumers will decide which search engine will stay, and which will go, not some judge or government.

Max Starkov
Hospitality & Online Travel Tech Consultant & Strategist

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