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As Google sits in court over monopoly claims, academics are studying why people choose specific search engines. Bing is better than people think, or at least that's what some said after participating in a study. The study, titled Sources of Market Power in Web Search: Evidence from a Field Experiment, evaluates the economic forces that contribute to Google's large share of the search market. Several findings from the study are interesting and relevant to ongoing court cases about web search. One key takeaway is that many people have never tried search engines other than Google. For the study, academics from Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT designed and performed an experiment with around 2,500 participants in which people were paid to use Bing instead of Google for two weeks. After that time, participants were given the choice to continue to use Bing or to go back to Google. While the majority of participants stuck with Google, roughly 22% continued to use Bing. A follow-up survey was sent out to some participants, several of whom selected the option "Bing was better than I thought it would be" when they explained why they continued to use Microsoft's search engine. According to the study's abstract: Requiring Google users to make an active choice among search engines increases Bing’s market share by only 1.1 percentage points, implying that switching costs play a limited role. Google users who accept our payment to try Bing for two weeks update positively about its relative quality, with 33 percent preferring to continue using it. After changing the default from Google to Bing, many users do not switch back, consistent with persistent inattention. The third point is particularly interesting because it lends validity to claims regarding why Google pays to have its search engine be the default on smartphone web browsers. Google is in the middle of a court case centered on whether the company holds an illegal monopoly in web search. The study states that according to the model used, Bing would see a market share boost of 15 percentage points if frictions related to search engine choice were removed and user beliefs were corrected. Is Google a monopoly? Google (Image credit: Future) While the study is entertaining to those who have followed Bing for years, it provides important insight into why people use Google as a search engine. Google has recently come under scrutiny from the United States Department of Justice (DOJ). Last year, a federal judge ruled that Google's payments to make the company's search engine the default on smartphone web browsers violated antitrust law. A recent DOJ filing claims that Google uses monopolistic practices that leverage search dominance in other markets. "Google has robbed consumers and businesses of a fundamental promise owed to the public—their right to choose among competing services," said the filing. That case is still ongoing, and the DOJ’s statements were proposals, not legal requirements. Google disagrees with the April filing and the company found itself back in court as of April 21, 2025. OpenAI has expressed interest in acquiring Chrome if Google is forced to sell it, though the company noted that many other parties would also be interested. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of March): 1,357 RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

Forcing the use of general search terms can help people change their minds. People are often quite selective about the information they'll accept, seeking out sources that will confirm their biases, while discounting those that will challenge their beliefs. In theory, search engines can potentially change that. By prioritizing results from high-quality, credible sources, a search engine could ensure that people found accurate information more frequently, potentially opening them to the possibility of updating their beliefs. Obviously, that hasn't worked out on the technology side, as people quickly learned how to game the algorithms used by search engines, meaning that the webpages that get returned have been created by people with no interest in quality or credibility. But a new study is suggesting that the concept fails on the human side, too, as people tend to devise search terms that are specific enough to ensure that the results of the search will end up reinforcing their existing beliefs. The study showed that invisibly swapping search terms to something more general can go a long way toward enabling people to change their mind. Searching for affirmation The new work was done by two researchers, Eugina Leung at Tulane University and Oleg Urminsky at the University of Chicago. Much of their study focuses on a simple question that people might turn to a search engine to answer: Is caffeine good or bad for you? If you wanted to search for that, you could potentially ask "what are the health effects of caffeine?" which should get you a mixture of the pros and cons. But people could also ask it in less neutral terms, such as, "Is caffeine bad for you?" These more specific searches are likely to pull up a more biased selection of results than the general, neutral terms. Leung and Urminsky did some tests that suggested this was likely to be a real-world problem. Using a Google Adwords planner, they pulled out some of the most common searches that included the word "caffeine" and found that over a quarter of them were narrowly focused and not likely to return a representative spectrum of information on the molecule's effects. Google data also suggests that people do tend to craft search terms that reflect their cognitive biases. "Google Trends data show that the higher the Republican vote share in a state," Leung and Urminsky write, "the more likely Google users in that state were to search 'Trump win' or 'Trump won' compared to searching 'Biden win' or 'Biden won.'" With that in mind, they designed a large series of experiments that looked into how these biases play out within controlled experiments. We won't go into all the details, but the general format of the work was to ask the participants their thoughts on an issue, such as whether caffeine was good or bad for you. The participants were then told to go search for more information, after which their opinions on the topic were checked again. The results, while not always dramatic, consistently pointed in the same direction: If a participant crafted narrow search terms, they were more likely to structure them in a way that should return information that confirms their biases. Or, as the researchers put it, "Experimental participants tended to devise questions that, if answered correctly, would corroborate rather than invalidate their hypothesis." And, not surprisingly, they were more likely to hang onto their original opinion after having been given the chance to look over the results of that search, whether it was provided by Google or GPT 3.5. The topic really didn't matter that much. Leung and Urminsky tested a list that included things like the societal impact of bitcoin to whether gas prices are likely to go up in the future. All of them displayed the same pattern. Again, it was never absolute—narrow searches tended to be 10 to 25 percent more common than general ones. There was simply a tendency to focus searches in a way that would likely reinforce existing beliefs. But that tendency was remarkably consistent. So, the researchers decided to see if they could upend it. Keeping it general The simplest way to change the dynamics of this was simply to change the results returned by the search. So, the researchers did a number of experiments where they gave all of the participants the same results, regardless of the search terms they had used. When everybody gets the same results, their opinions after reading them tend to move in the same direction, suggesting that search results can help change people's opinions. The researchers also tried giving everyone the results of a broad, neutral search, regardless of the terms they'd entered. This weakened the probability that beliefs would last through the process of formulating and executing a search. In other words, avoiding the sorts of focused, biased search terms allowed some participants to see information that could change their minds. Despite all the swapping, participants continued to rate the search results relevant. So, providing more general search results even when people were looking for more focused information doesn't seem to harm people's perception of the service. In fact, Leung and Urminsky found that the AI version of Bing search would reformulate narrow questions into more general ones. That said, making this sort of change wouldn't be without risks. There are a lot of subject areas where a search shouldn't return a broad range of information—where grabbing a range of ideas would expose people to fringe and false information. Nevertheless, it can't hurt to be aware of how we can use search services to reinforce our biases. So, in the words of Leung and Urminsky, "When search engines provide directionally narrow search results in response to users’ directionally narrow search terms, the results will reflect the users’ existing beliefs, instead of promoting belief updating by providing a broad spectrum of related information." PNAS, 2025. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2408175122 (About DOIs). Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of February): 874 RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

Users are reportedly ditching Google for AI-powered tools and apps like ChatGPT, citing better accuracy and relevance. With the emergence of generative AI, AI-powered tools like Copilot, ChatGPT, and more are quickly gaining broad adoption. As a result, there's been a dramatic shift, especially in how people interact with information on the Internet, thanks to the emergence of AI-powered tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT search. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently revealed that he's using ChatGPT more than ever as it seemingly evolves into a so-called 'Everything App.' "I don't do Google searches anymore," added Altman. A new study highlighted by our sister site, Tom's Guide, echoes the same sentiments. According to a survey featuring 510 participants in the US and an additional 518 in the UK conducted by our parent company, Future Publishing, approximately 27% of the US participants are heavily inclined to use AI-powered search tools like ChatGPT as conventional tools like Google seemingly fade away into the horizon. AI specialist Amanda Caswell attributes the dramatic shift to well-curated, in-depth, and contextual answers delivered with a more human-like tone in a straightforward set of apps that save time, are easy to use, and offer personalization for added accuracy and relevance. Interestingly, a separate study by Gartner seemingly corroborates Future's findings, citing that AI-powered tools like ChatGPT search will take over 30% of online search queries by 2026, potentially denting Google's longstanding search dominance. It'll be interesting to see how companies at the forefront of the dramatic shift to AI tools for online search queries handle abound issues, including the rampant erroneous AI-generated summaries. Satya Nadella could make up for Microsoft's Google transgressions with Copilot AI Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. (Image credit: Windows Central) "We missed what turned out to be the biggest business model," indicated Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella while speaking to Dwarkesh Patel during a recent interview. The executive admitted that Microsoft underestimated search which ended up being one of the company's biggest mistakes. Nadella admitted that the company's initial thoughts about search were that it would remain decentralized, but this wasn't the case, giving Google the ultimate opportunity to grasp dominance in the landscape with a significant lead and precision. "Who would have thought that search would be the biggest winner in organizing the web?" he added. "We obviously didn't see it, and Google saw it and executed it super well." As the next generation of web users seemingly takes on new trends like scouring the web with AI tools, Microsoft could attempt to crack Google's search dominance with Copilot. Like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Microsoft's AI offerings ship with similar capabilities, allowing users to pull fast and intricate (if sometimes imperfect) responses to queries. However, the company may have to address multiple concerns raised by users following its recent massive Copilot overhaul. Microsoft 'Insiders' cited that the upgrade shipped with a degraded user experience and was "a step backward." If Microsoft can address some of its most pressing issues quickly and thoroughly enough, it could have a standing chance to take on OpenAI's ChatGPT as users ditch Google for AI-powered tools. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of January): 487 RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

Google continues to dominate the search engine market share, while Bing staggers behind with only 3.4% of the global stake. What you need to know Bing's market share in search remains stagnant despite Microsoft's heavy investment in AI. Its market share stood at 3.4% at the end of last year, with Google asserting its dominance in the category with a whopping 91.6%. Microsoft could potentially be in a position to make up for this after Google was listed as a gatekeeper by the European Commission under the DMA, which forced it to allow users to use Bing or Microsoft as their default search engine or browser respectively. It's almost one year since Microsoft unveiled its fully-fledged AI-powered assistant, Microsoft Copilot (formerly Bing Chat) which is widely available across Microsoft Edge, Windows 11, Bing, and Microsoft 365. Part of these efforts are geared toward gaining traction in the search market share, which is currently dominated by Google. And now, Microsoft's efforts have seemingly been rendered futile, at least according to a survey by Statcounter, which indicates that Bing's market share has only grown by less than 1% since debuting Microsoft Copilot. A graph showcasing widely popular search engines and their global search market share. (Image credit: Statcounter) As spotted by Bloomberg, Bing closed off 2023 with just 3.4% of the global search market, while Google continues to dominate the category with a whopping 91.6% of the market share. Other search engines like Yandex and Yahoo came in closely after Bing with 1.6% and 1.1% of the global search market respectively. A similar report from the research firm from last year also pointed out that Bing's market share remained pretty much the same (stagnant) for the better part of last year. However, its user base grew significantly shortly after Microsoft Copilot's launch, ultimately pushing it from 95.7 million in February to 101.7 million in March. Unfortunately, the increased traffic was short-lived, as the hype for AI advances seemingly dwindled amongst users. Ai might not save Bing's sinking ship (Image credit: Windows Central | Bing Image Creator) Despite Microsoft's heavy investment in generative AI and its ever-evolving relationship with ChatGPT maker, OpenAI, Google continues to assert its dominance in search. While making an appearance in Google's antitrust trial last year, Microsoft's CEO indicated that Google doesn't play fair with Bing, further pointing out that Apple's deal with Google to use its search engine across its wide array of devices has negatively impacted Bing. The CEO also said that he was willing to part with up to $15 billion annually to secure a similar deal with Apple, citing that it would be a game-changer for Bing. Recent reports highlighting that chatbots like Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT are only getting dumber, coupled with the exorbitant cost implication required to keep these chatbots don't help Microsoft to state its case. Opportunities for Microsoft to exploit (Image credit: Windows Central / Copilot) However, Microsoft could potentially make up for these shortcomings by taking advantage of the European Commission listing Google as a gatekeeper under the DMA. The company was given six months to comply with the DMA rules, including ensuring its services are interoperable. Google has already started making changes to its services in compliance with the DMA. One of the most notable changes made is that users will now be able to easily set Microsoft Bing and Edge as their default search engine and browser, respectively. This could potentially allow Microsoft Bing to compete with Google on an even playing field. As it happens, it seems Microsoft Edge and Bing might be off the European Commission's hook after investigations revealed that the services weren't dominant enough to warrant regulation and scrutiny by the watchdog. That said, Google continues to make advances in the AI landscape with its own ChatGPT-like iteration, Google Bard, coupled with other nifty AI-powered features. It will be interesting to see how things pan out in the long run for Microsoft with these potentially beneficial opportunities. Do you think Microsoft Bing will overtake Google in the search market share race? Share your thoughts in the comments. Source

Generative AI will pose a serious threat to search engines in just the next two years according to a forecast from the analyst firm Gartner. It said that search engine volume will fall by one quarter by 2026 due to the adoption of AI chatbots and other virtual agents. With the shift to artificial intelligence away from traditional search engines, Gartner says that companies will have to adjust their marketing channels strategies. Alan Antin, Vice President Analyst at Gartner, said: The analyst firm also said that search engine algorithms will favour quality content to help offset the growing amount of AI-generated content. In addition, it’s expected that watermarking will become more important as a means to highlight high-value content. While Google will probably not be liking this prediction, it’s important to note that it and many of the other providers of search engines are the main providers of generative AI services; Google has Gemini and Microsoft has Copilot. So while traditional search engine usage may decline in favour of AI, it will still be the likes of Google getting the traffic, however, it could mean that there will need to be some sort of replacement for sponsored links which Google relies on for revenue, Gartner didn’t mention this in its forecast but the generative AI revolution also means smaller players could become significant competitors to Google in search. Most will know of Microsoft’s Copilot which is essentially ChatGPT with web access but there is also Perplexity, a startup that has attracted funding from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and NVIDIA. Source: Gartner Source

Search engine Neeva announced today that it launched officially in the three European countries , and the United Kingdom. Neeva is one of several search startups that is taking on the heavyweights Google Search and Bing. Founded by two former Google employees, it is an attempt to move away from the current advertisement-influenced search model towards one that is more user-friendly and useful. Not only is Neeva promising an ad-free search environment, it is also guaranteeing that users are not tracked and that search results are not biased. Other features that set it apart from traditional search engines are options to customize the search experience, by prioritizing or downgrading certain sites or sources, or link to accounts on sites such as Dropbox, Figma or Slack, to include personal files in search results. Neeva, like its rival Kagi, is available for free. Both finance search through premium accounts, which add functionality to the search experience. The main idea behind both services is to finance operations solely through paying users. Currently, Neeva Premium is offered only in the United States, but the company announced plans to launch the premium option in the future in Europe as well. Premium users gain access to new search engine features first, and get to use a VPN and password manager next to that. Users from , and the United Kingdom get local search results for certain search topics, including stocks, weather, restaurants and more. French and German language versions of the interface are available as well. Neeva uses its own index and Bing to deliver search results to users. The service supports image, video, news and maps searches, and search suggestions. The search engine stores a "limited amount of information" about its users to "make the product better" for the individual user, according to the service's FAQ. The information is deleted after 90 days by default. Closing Words It remains to be seen how ad-free search engines like Neeva or Kagi fare in the coming months and years. There is certainly a market for unbiased and ad-free search results, but it is not clear how many Internet users are willing to pay for that privilege. Both services need paying customers in the future to finance operations. For now, Neeva is set on expansion and less focused on revenue generation. Now You: would you pay for unbiased ad-free search results? Neeva search engine launches in , and the United Kingdom

Google is the only mainstream search engine where you’ll see recent results from Reddit, 404 Media reports. Reddit is ramping up its crackdown on web crawlers. Over the past few weeks, Reddit has started blocking search engines from surfacing recent posts and comments unless the search engine pays up, according to a report from 404 Media. Right now, Google is the only mainstream search engine that shows recent results when you search for posts on Reddit using the “site:reddit.com” trick, 404 Media reports. This leaves out Bing, DuckDuckGo, and other alternatives — and that’s likely because Google has struck a $60 million deal that lets the company train its AI models on content from Reddit. It’s a bold move for a massive website like Reddit to block some of the most popular search engines, but it’s not all that surprising. Over the past year, Reddit has become more protective of its data as it looks to open up another source of revenue and appease new investors. After making its API more expensive for some third-party developers, Reddit reportedly threatened to cut off Google if it didn’t stop using the platform’s data to train AI for free. The Verge reached out to Reddit with a request for comment but didn’t immediately hear back. Last month, to enforce its policy against scraping, Reddit updated the site’s robots.txt file, which tells web crawlers whether they can access a site. “It’s a signal to those who don’t have an agreement with us that they shouldn’t be accessing Reddit data,” Ben Lee, Reddit’s chief legal officer, told my colleague Alex Heath in Command Line. With AI chatbots filling the internet with questionable content, finding things written by a fellow human has never been more important. I, like many others, have started appending “Reddit” to many of my searches just to get human answers, and it’s pretty frustrating to know that I’ll now only be able to do that on Google (or search engines that rely on it) — especially when I do many of my searches on Bing. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years. 2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of June): 2,839 news posts

Firefox 98 will be released in early March 2022 and it will include a change that replaces the default search engine of the browser with another automatically for some users. Firefox ships with a number of search engines based on a user's region. The default search engine is the one that is used automatically when the user types in the address bar or uses other means to search, e.g., from the browser's New Tab Page. In most regions, Google Search is the default, but in some, other search engines such as Baidu or Yandex are the default. Firefox users are free to add search engines to the browser and change the default search engine. If they prefer to use DuckduckGo, Startpage or Brave Search, they may do so as the browser supports it. An article on Mozilla's support website confirms that the default search engine may change for some Firefox users with the release of Firefox 98. The support article is vague when it comes to specifics. It does not mention search engines by name nor does it provide any other details. According to Mozilla, the change is necessary because it "was unable to secure formal permission to continue including search engines in Firefox". Mozilla "provided an opportunity to previously-included search engines to sign an agreement" and some search engine companies "did not complete the agreement" according to the article. The nature of the agreement is unknown. It is unclear if it included financial compensation or other requirements. The Bugzilla bug listing is set to private. Firefox ships with a number of search engines, many of which are local search engines that are available besides global ones, others are search engines of commercial sites. It appears that only these search engines are affected, but there is no confirmation of this at this point. Firefox users who are affected by the changing of the default search engine are informed about this when the browser launches. Your default search engine has been changed. Firefox no longer supports NAME. Google is now your default search engine. Firefox users may re-add the removed search engine to the browser again after the removal; this is a strong point in favor of the theory that the removal affects built-in search engines only, as Mozilla might likely not allow this otherwise. Closing Words The support page lacks information and there is a chance that only a small subset of users are affected by the change. Mozilla is shooting itself into the foot with the omittance of important information in the article. Would it be that difficult to list the affected search engines or provide a brief explanation of the agreement that search engine companies had to sign? This miscommunication happens frequently. It is often a tempest in a teapot that could have been avoided entirely if communication would have been clearer. Mozilla will replace the default search engine for some Firefox users

Most web browsers ship with a bunch of different search engines that you may switch to, if you are not a fan of the default option. In addition to changing the provider, you may delete the default search engines from the list. But it appears that Chromium based browsers no longer allow you to do it. This change does not affect the option to set your default engine, you just won't be able to the preloaded providers. That's not necessarily a bad thing per se. Chromium-based browsers will not allow you to delete the default search engines A reddit user reported that Microsoft Edge has removed the ability to remove default search engines from the settings. While it is true, another user pointed out that it is not a change in Edge, but in all Chromium-based browsers. Some users says that this only affects the Windows version of the browsers, and that the Linux variants have the option. According to a commit on the open-source project's page, the proposal to remove the delete button was made in October 2021. The developers felt that deleting the search engines was too easy, and that it was a bad thing because it would not be easy for users to add them back, as it is not possible to set the search provider for suggestions, new tag page and other specialized URLs. Following a small discussion which concluded that deleting a search provider could cause more problems than it would break, the change was approved a day later when Chromium 97 was released. Chrome 97 was released about ten days ago, and it became the first Chromium-based browser that removed the delete button from the Manage Search Engines page. Microsoft, Opera and Brave have followed suit in removing said option from their respective browsers. As of now, only Vivaldi, which is still based on Chromium 96, has the option to delete the default search engines. When the browser gets updated to the code based on Chromium 97, it will likely not allow users to remove the search providers. Firefox and Waterfox do not prevent users from deleting the built-in search options either. Chromium-based browsers will continue to allow the user to edit the keywords but not the URLs. You can still add custom search providers if you want to, and this allows you to edit the search parameters. I think this change may not affect most users. It is a precautionary measure that could end up protecting the user in the event a malware tries to delete the default search engine, or hijack it. That said, if a malicious extension, toolbar or website, manages to use the add search engine option to inject a harmful search provider in the browser, and set it as the default provider, it wouldn't be stopped, would it? That is likely a very rare scenario, one that can easily be prevented by using an ad-blocker like uBlock Origin, avoiding illegal websites, and good old common sense of not clicking links randomly. I will admit that I find it surprising that the removal of a simple feature in Chromium's source code impacts every browser that uses it as the base, do they have a choice? This does give Google an advantage over the competition. This got me wondering about what could happen when Google decides to kill support for v2 add-ons, and forces extensions to use Manifest V3. Will it impact other browsers in the same way? I mean, if there is no webRequest API that can be used, what could they possibly do except to rely on their own built-in ad-blockers? Browsers based on Chromium will no longer allow users to delete default search engines from the settings

ChatGPT Is a large language model that was developed by OpenAI, and it's trained to work on conversational text. it generates human-like text based on the input it receives and uses machine-learning techniques. it can be used for a variety of natural language processing tasks such as language translation, text generation, and text summarization. ChartGPT is a type of GPT-3 Language model. Since it is capable of understanding and responding, it has useful and informative answers to questions. Analyzing the response that we got from the definition, the biggest question I bring to the table with this article is: Could ChatGPT replace Google? And who better to answer this question than ChatGPT itself? Well, ChatGPT thinks not. Let's continue to analyze ChatGPT and come up with our own judgment based on our discovery. There are a lot of things ChatGPT can and can’t do below; we'll look at some of the things that it can’t do. ChatGPT is a tool that purely generates text and can't perform actions or tasks. it doesn't have any capabilities beyond its ability to generate responses as though it were a real person. It is a trained model, and hence it can’t learn or adapt to any new information beyond what it's trained on. For example, at the moment, ChatGPT has information up to the year 2021 and can’t give any information beyond that. It can't respond to voice searches or give any visual responses. All the things that ChatGPT can't do, search engines perform effortlessly. It's really hard to tell if language models such as ChatGPT could have a future. The rate at which technology is advancing brings uncertainty as to where these language models are headed. From the look of things, they are likely to progress and become better as the years go by. From my point of view, as much as they can provide some useful answers to questions, it hasn’t yet reached the level of replacing a search engine like Google. So what is likely to happen to these language models? They are likely to be a small number of language models that others could use to build upon in the future. There will also be a need for deeper domain details. The great part about this is that the Generative AI space is only still at the grassroots. and the uses for AI are likely to increase day by day. Language models are likely to be commoditized in the future. Finding sources of data that could train these models to survive in these different domains is essential to consider. Machine learning and AI could either be inference or training. Inference means the model can generate information in real-time, while learning means it collects information from already-established data. The future and existence of these models lie in finding unique sources of data that can be used in training the models. ChatGPT has received quite the attention since its release, although I believe that its replacing Google is still far-fetched and won't be happening anytime soon. Source: https://writesonic.com/blog/will-chatgpt-kill-google/ Will ChatGPT Replace Google? The Future of Search Engines in the AI Era