Will Google Ever Fail?

We’ve seen it countless times. Giants—whether they be corporations or empires or sports teams—take their place at the peak of power. Then, a few short years later, they go down in a blaze or simply fade into obscurity.

Right now, SEOs beat to the drum of the world’s most popular search engine, but can Google maintain its god-like status? We crowd-sourced the question to industry experts. Read their predictions below.

Of course

DuckDuckGo

Will Google ever fail? Of course. No business can ever be guaranteed to be number 1 in their industry forever. If a competitor can come along with a better product than Google, it could happen. In saying that, I believe Google would have to make a drastic mistake in strategy to get the public offside, AND a competitor would have to have a quality search engine offering.

DuckDuckGo is best placed to take advantage of any Google missteps. They claim to not share any personal information on users. I really like this aspect of DuckDuckGo. The actual search engine itself provides a simple and clean user experience. Overall not a bad replacement to Google without providing your name, rank, and serial number.

Hard to tell

Google has failed multiple times

Google has failed multiple times if we look at all its failed products, such as Google Plus. And it will continue to fail, learn, and move onward. Most likely, Google’s search engine will remain on top for at least another 10 years. There are, of course, some events that can ruin this theory altogether.

The Foundem case against Google from the UK is one of those events where Google could be forced to reveal its search algorithm secrets to win in court. I cannot imagine the consequences of this outcome. The SEO community will explode, and user experience might suffer from the way we are going to do online marketing based on some robotic logic we’ve learned from Google’s search algorithm.

The Foundem case aside, Google has proven in recent years that it wants to collect information on the Web and display it in one place. This can either be a good or bad thing, depending on how you look at it. If you’re in e-commerce, you can still make sales in Google’s shopping carousel, but if you are a publisher, you might need to optimize your search snippets to avoid small click-through rates on your website. And Google is constantly AB testing and changing its search engine, from design to the algorithm itself.

It’s hard to tell for sure if Google will fail for good one day. It’s a probability if we look at Google as an empire, and there have been empires that collapsed in ancient times. But we live in different times where people are technology-dependent, and Google is still leading the information-demand market.

The path is two-fold

It’s a big question for sure. There is a certain path that Google could take that I believe would lead to failure, at least in the search space. That path is two-fold, prioritizing profits over the user and removing all benefits to content creators. The latter we’ve seen with gradual increases in the use of ‘clickless’ search results and the development of richer search results. The former is an area I think Google stands to lose the most from; if they lose pace with the needs of their user base, be this through a prioritization of paid content (something I believe people are becoming more aware of) or a relaxing of their standards, users will eventually move onto other engines and there are plenty of those.

I don’t personally believe that the above is likely to happen however and “Google It” will continue to be commonplace in our lives. Google understands there will always need to be a balance between earned and paid content in the search results and is acutely aware that users keep the lights on, so pushing that relationship too far is a dangerous game for them.

One relation they hold most, if not all of the cards in, is with content creators. Wherever the users are, the industry will follow, so any idea of a content creator boycott or a migration away from Google as a focal point for SEOs as a result of a loss of benefits, i.e., site traffic is highly unlikely.

I do, however, believe Google’s biggest challenge at the moment likely resides somewhere in the increased awareness users have of their personal data and their digital privacy. Increases in users for engines like Duck Duck Go and browsers like Brave mark a change in search behavior. In not addressing this, Google stands to lose the more ‘aware’ users.

So in short, Google won’t fail, unless it doesn’t adapt to the increasing awareness of users and the change in user behavior towards things like privacy online.

Too big to fail

I don’t think Google will ever fall, because it’s “too big to fail”. The fall of Google is the fall of Alphabet and that is just too big. It is possible, stranger things have happened. In that case, Google’s technology will be transferred to another company that will continue doing what Google did.

I think the company is not just about Google the search engine, but many other AI projects that cost millions of dollars and are used in research, military, etc. Of course, there isn’t much competition in the English search engine world. Bing is much less accurate than Google in terms of providing quality search results. DuckDuckGo is an interesting alternative that has found its niche, and with the increase of Google’s scandals about privacy, it will continue to grow and perhaps overtake Bing.

I don’t think Google will ever fail

They are simply a juggernaut in the space. Just this last quarter, their revenue was up 17% from a year ago which is just amazing growth for such a large, multi-billion dollar company.

Not only do they control online advertising through a near-monopoly on the search engine space, but they also control the rules on who gets ranked and how. Think about it; the entire SEO industry exists primarily to try to figure out how to do well in Google rankings. Add to this that we’re not just talking about the U.S. here as more than half of Google’s revenue comes internationally these days. Basically, there’s no way to beat the dominant player in the game when they also get to set the rules.

Privacy is becoming a massive issue for Google

Yes, if Duck Duck Go has anything to do with it. Privacy is becoming a massive issue for Google at the moment, and people are very slowly migrating to Bing and DuckDuckGo.

DuckDuckGo would be our choice as they have got their privacy laws locked down. Google and Facebook have been taking a hammering in the press and [received] massive fines by the courts, so if DDG or another search engine approached this with the right marketing, they could look at making a decent dent in taking business from Google.

Another worthwhile mention is Ahrefs, widely known as the best link SAAS software out there. They announced their plans on building a search engine over six months ago. However, nothing has been heard since, which has led me to believe they are working behind the scenes. They certainly have the capital to do so, and they already have the trust of consumers.