No company has cornered a product or service quite like how Google has dominated internet search in the western world. With more than 87% US market share (according to StatCounter), Google has never looked likely to be toppled from its perch — but that hasn't stopped people from trying.
This week a new competitor sprung up. "You" launched its service and announced a $20m round of investment from some notable venture capitalists, joining the list of rivals looking to cement second place.
Silver is still good
For a long time, the silver medal of internet search has belonged to either Yahoo! or Microsoft's Bing, each of which has held onto somewhere between 5% and 10% of the search market share for the last decade. That's a big enough slice to be worth billions to each company, but it's still nothing compared to the ~85% market share that Google has averaged during that time.
But rivals like Ecosia, which promises to plant trees with its revenue, and DuckDuckGo, which is focused much more on data privacy, have gotten some decent traction in recent years. DuckDuckGo in particular appears to be making headway, with data from StatCounter putting their market share above 2% and climbing. That's closing in on Yahoo!, and was enough progress for the company to secure $100m of investment last year.
That's impressive progress, but it's been 13 years in the making, which goes to show how hard it is to compete against a company whose product is literally a verb.
