Google is an American multinational corporation that is considered among the world’s biggest companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Apple; with over a billion users of its each service category. It was founded on September 4, 1998, by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It offers internet-related products and services like search engine, chrome, online advertisements, YouTube, Google maps & play store; software and hardware.
As a said before, each of its product & service categories has over a billion users; whether it’s search engines, cloud computing, smartphones, or advertisement. However, it doesn’t mean Google is the sole shareholder in the market; it has its competitors in each of its categories. Today, we’ll discuss Google’s competitors in different industries one by one.
Table of Contents
Google Competitors in Advertising Industry
Facebook is an American social networking platform that also offers targeted advertisement to businesses, brands, and organizations. According to Facebook’s worldwide users’ statistics; it has 2.45 billion active users by the end of 2019. Facebook achieved the figure of one billion by the third quarter of 2012.
Google Vs Facebook
Both of these platforms have billions of users worldwide, and they’re in great competition with each other to have more ads from everywhere. However, it’s a very difficult decision for business; which platform to choose for the advertisement.
AdWords is the advertising platform of Google; which helps businesses to find their customers by using specific keywords used by the majority of users. Advertisers use such keywords to find their customers.
On the other hand, Facebook’s paid ads promote the content of their clients to target their required market. Then customers will automatically be attracted to their business, and choose the product or service whatever you want to sell.
Facebook owns around about 22.1% of the internet ads worldwide, and Google controls approximately 37% of the total internet ads share across the globe.
Amazon
Amazon is an online shopping website that has over 300 million users worldwide; out of which over 80 million users are Americans. It controls the total internet ads share of 8% globally and the figure is increasing. However, the figure may seem lower; but it’s a very high figure if you compare it with its total users.
Google Vs Amazon
The functionality of Amazon’s ads is completely different from Google; because as we know Amazon is an e-commerce platform. Therefore, it uses a direct promotion of sponsored products in different places relevant to the products.
For instance, the ads of cosmetic products will appear in the beauty and makeup blogs. Instead of solely relying on the user’s engagement with the content and time spent reading the information provided.
Therefore, Google is planning to adopt direct product-based advertisement just like Amazon in the coming year. It is not direct and effective, but real money lies in the direct sponsored ads of the product.
Google Search Competitors
Yahoo
In the line of search engines; Google holds the maximum market share of approximately 92.62% of searches worldwide. The search engine of Yahoo! Search is among the few competitors that are still competing with Google for having a market share of 2.32% searches worldwide.
However, Google controls only 63.2% of searches in the US; whereas Yahoo has an 11.5% US market share in the searches.
Google Vs Yahoo
Yahoo was launched in the early 1990s. In the early 2000s, yahoo partnered up with Google to work collectively to get searches and ads. Their partnership ended in the 2004 when Yahoo developed its technology of carrying out searches on its own.
Later yahoo made a deal with Microsoft which doesn’t turn out to be much fruitful and ended in 2010. Before Google, Yahoo was the first search engine, but it wasn’t like today’s search engines. It only used to present all the websites in the hierarchical order. Google filled the gap by presenting the most relevant information according to the user’s requirements.
Bing
Bing is a search engine which is owned by Microsoft and it has gone by previously by many names such as Live Search, Window Live Search, and MSN Search. Google dominates the search engine industry by keeping the 92.62% market share; Bing has a market share of 2.63% of the total searches worldwide.
Google Vs Bing
Bing is the refined form of earlier search engines; MSN. Microsoft launches it in 2009; it started with the name of MSN, then Window Live Search and finally Bing.
With the aggressive marketing strategy of Microsoft and partnering up with the Yahoo search engine; MSN took hold of a reasonable market share to sustain in the competition. Google’s algorithm is bringing up the feed of new and latest content for the user. Bing, on the other hand, focuses on providing the old and most reputable pages to its users.
DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo, a search engine, was launched in 2008 and named after the kid’s game Duck, Duck, Goose. Some say that it’s an anti-Google search engine because its graph is moving upward direction and it has gained a lot of popularity among users. In the beginning, it has a few thousand searches per day. By the end of 2019, it has over 48 million searches daily.
Google Vs DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo search engine works completely different than other search engines because it doesn’t profile users and protect their privacy. By profiling, it means that it shows the same result to its users at a given time of searches. It generates the best result by going through over 400 different sources like yahoo, Wikipedia, and various search engines; deliver the quality result to its users.
Google, on the other hand, keeps a record of all of its users. When you search for something, it’ll show you the result based on your pattern of searches.
Ever since the scandal of the user’s privacy setting by Google in 2019; DuckDuckGo has become famous among privacy-conscious users. Now, people are starting to prefer less features but safe searches than being watched and tracked.
Baidu
Baidu is a China-based tech company which offers internet-related products and services; Baidu search engine is among one of them. It was founded by Robin Li & Eric Xu in 2000; Baidu holds the market share of 2.03% of the total search in the china and worldwide. In simple words, it’s Chinese Google.
Just like Google; Baidu offers almost similar products to its users such as music, games, location, maps, searches, information, etc. However, its focus entirely on the local Chinese market while following Chinese censorship and government rules and regulation. Google is expanding its market share globally.
Google Vs Baidu
Chinese language is complex of having multiple meanings of the same word in different contexts; Baidu understands the language and cultural complexities, which is why it serves the Chinese market better than any other search engine.
Baidu has also made alliances with different manufacturers of smartphones and other devices to integrate Baidu search engine app among them. Google is growing and serving its users globally, but not in china; because Baidu is offering the same products and services in the Chinese language which is more convenient.
Baidu also offers some unique features like the missing person search, patent search, and senior citizen search; however, these things demand legal requirements which Baidu satisfies it.
Yandex
Yandex is a Russian web search engine; it was launched in 2010 to optimize non-Russian language searches for the local users. It holds more than 57% of the total market share in Russia; there’s a great usage of Yandex in the neighboring countries like Turkey, Kazakhstan, and Belarus.
Google Vs Yandex
One of the main differences between Yandex and Google is that the search quires of users are dependent on the region of the users; which means there’ll be different search results for all the users as their location changes.
Geo dependant and geo independent type of searches of Yandex are good for the local business, but not for the international brands which operates in multiple cities and regions. Which makes the SEO of Yandex much complex than Google’s.
Google Competitors in Smartphone Industry
Apple
Apple is a tech corporation that works in the line of smartphones, operating system software, and other product and services to its users. iOS app store has over 2 million apps for the users of iPhone.
According to the stat counter Apple has 22.87% Mobile Operating System Market Share Worldwide.
No doubt Apple is a leading player in the smartphone segment and holds 13% of the total smartphone market share in the 2019 Q3, where as Huawei has 18.6% and Samsung has a a leading position of 21.8%.
Google Vs Apple
Google is preparing to compete in the Smartphone industry as it has acquired its hardware and software technology, but It is already much ahead of it in the line of smartphones. Google a long way to go and many competitors to face in the industry; whereas it holds the market share of 2.28%.
Samsung
Samsung is a South Korean multinational conglomerate organization. It was found in 1938, initially it insurance, securities, and textiles industry. Then in the 1960s and 70s, it entered in the construction and shipbuilding industry. Ever since the 1990s, Samsung has been focusing on the electronics and smartphones. In 2017, Samsung ranked top 6 global brands. The global market share of Samsung is 21.8% of the total smartphones and electronic devices by the end of 2019.
Google vs. Samsung
Perhaps you’d be surprised to know the fun fact that Google owns the operating system android of Samsung devices. The major focus of Google has always been on the software and operating system rather than manufacturing the hardware. Ever since Google has started producing its hardware device such as smartphones etc, Samsung and Google has become competitor since then.
Huawei
Huawei is a Chinese multinational tech and telecommunication organization; its products are smartphones and consumer electronic devices. It has over 188000 employees by the end of 2018, out of which 76000 are in the Research & Development field; with the total R & D budget of 13.8 billion US dollars. By the end of 2019, Huawei has a market share of 18.6% worldwide.
Huawei vs. Google
Ever since the economic trade war conflict started between Trump administration and China; the US restricted all the Huawei smartphones. On Jun 29, 2019, the US and China reached an agreement and lift the restriction on Huawei and other Chinese products.
This ongoing inter-government tension also has put Google in a very critical situation; the US ban on Chinese product means Google also has to comply with those restrictions, and stop supplying products and android operating systems to Huawei. As we know, Google owns the Android operating system and issue its license to different companies to use it in their smartphones.
However, Huawei has recently launched its new operating system by the name of Harmony to fill the gap; but android is still the first choice of Huawei’s devices. The whole situation is still uncertain about the future.
Google Competitors in Cloud Computing
Amazon Web Services
Amazon web services offer cloud computing services like storage, database, customer service, analytics, etc. to government, people and organizations. AWS is leading in the race of cloud computing by having a total market share of 34% worldwide; where Google, on the other hand, holds only 9% of the market share.
Google Cloud Vs Amazon Web Services
AWS and GCP both have almost the same characteristics and offer almost the same service. AWS is comparatively more mature and powerful in terms of handling a more complex IT environment. All the data centers of AWS across the world are connected through fiber; once any user compute any of these services in milliseconds, then payment is charged against the service provided.
Google cloud platform isn’t as efficient and flexible as AWS; it also offers several services but with limited features like IoT, networking, and other enterprise applications.
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure is the second big platform after AWS in the field of cloud computing, and it comprises the total market share of 19% worldwide. Google comes third, whereas Google is planning to invest more in this line by partnering it up with other platforms.
Google Vs Microsoft Azure
When we talk about cloud computing services of GCP and Microsoft Azure; then we don’t find much dissimilarity between both of them. They both control the same market share with a very minor difference.
Google has always been an online and operating system type of industry, and it is always interested in the growing field. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and cloud computing are the next big thing.
However, the reason for Microsoft to enter into the field of cloud computing is because Microsoft wanted to benefit from the focussed investment of its enterprise.
