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Is Google Slipping? Search Engine Traffic Patterns Analyzed

We all understand that Google is the king of search and has been for years. Saying “Google it” has become the default lingo when you are telling someone to research something.

In the early days of search Yahoo! was king. There were other search engines like Lycos and Excite which did OK for themselves, but Yahoo was number one. This position wasn’t earned however. They were kings by default. There was plenty of space in the search market for a better search engine.

In 1999 Google was launched. And even though it took a few years for them to gain #1 status, they were instantly a hit. Their algorithms were better at giving searchers the results they were looking for. If you provide a better product on a massive scale then you will succeed.

Here we are 20+ years later and Google is still king of the mountain, responsible for turning out almost 90% of all online search results. But there does seem to be change in the air.

From nationally reported figures as well as from where we sit, we are noticing a slight erosion in Google’s dominance. There are several reasons for this and we want to go over those reasons now.

1. Privacy – Google has notoriously been accused of using people’s data and they have never been shy about admitting it. When you get to use their site for absolutely free then there has to be a catch. Yes, you are the product. People have been looking for more privacy based engines, duckduckgo.com for example.
2. Censorship – In the last several years, tech companies like Google have taken a more political stance in their business model. People have pointed out over-and-over again slanted search results which lean left, not to mention that Google will usually have some “woke” based message on their homepage.
3. Diversity – People may just not be getting the results they are looking for. In our opinion Google still has the richest and usually most accurate search results but some folks have found them lacking. They have switched to competing search engines like Bing, which  are improving their product all the time. As a matter of fact we really like what Bing is doing. The problem is that they are also a huge tech corporation and who is to say what they will do with a giant market-share should they ever gain one.

We are including the search results for a site which we manage below.  This is a pretty typical daily result. You can see there are some search engines gaining ground on the Google dominance. Yahoo seems to be a making a strong comeback effort.