For the last decade-plus, the search engine market has been a snooze. The industry has been dominated by Google -- the main subsidiary of technology giant Alphabet (GOOG -1.10%) (GOOGL -1.23%) -- with a 90% market share across internet-connected devices worldwide. Given how profitable the search engine market is, this dominance has enabled Alphabet to print money year after year with remarkable consistency. Now, its largest competitor, Microsoft (MSFT -1.27%), wants a piece of that pie.
The owner of the Windows operating system and Internet Explorer (now renamed Microsoft Edge) has made a sizable investment into OpenAI to bring the start-up's disruptive artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot to its Bing search engine. This partnership has investors nervous that Google could shed users if Bing search results start becoming more helpful than Google.
Can Google defend itself from this onslaught of new AI products from Microsoft and OpenAI? Let's investigate.
Microsoft's plan to win market share in search
OpenAI's ChatGPT tools have taken the internet by storm. Gaining over 100 million users in just two months after launching, the human-like AI language model is now considered the fastest-growing consumer product in history.
Microsoft -- already an investor in OpenAI -- saw this success and decided to deepen its partnership with the start-up, investing $10 billion into the company and making its cloud infrastructure service, Azure, the exclusive computing provider for OpenAI. The Azure deal will be lucrative by itself given how computationally intensive these AI models are, but Microsoft saw an opportunity to go further with this new OpenAI partnership with its Bing search engine.
In early February, Microsoft launched a revamped version of Bing that allows users to access the conversational ChatGPT tool directly from the search engine. This was a major shot across the bow to Google, with Microsoft executives hoping the new tool can convince users to switch search engine providers. As of this writing, it is estimated that Bing has a 2.81% global market share compared to Google's 93.37%. It is too early to tell whether this revamped Bing will make a dent in Google's dominance, but news outlets are reporting Alphabet is nervous about its search engine competitor for the first time in years.
Google's strategy to defend its position
While some investors are worried Google has gotten caught flat-footed with this OpenAI-Microsoft partnership, Google looks ready to defend itself. It recently launched its response to ChatGPT, called Bard, which seems to have similar capabilities to the one launched on Bing. Google was also able to launch AI tools on Google Workspace that are very similar to what Microsoft is now offering to Office 365 customers. Whether it had these tools ready to go internally or was able to produce them within a few short weeks, Google has been able to counter Microsoft's product announcements fairly easily. And it didn't need to make a $10 billion investment in order to make it happen, either.
It is misleading to say Google is behind Microsoft in AI. Sure, with this OpenAI partnership, Microsoft has a temporary lead in one aspect of AI (conversational chatbots), but Google has been investing in AI for years. It acquired the preeminent AI research institution DeepMind back in 2014 and has steadily increased the amount of AI it puts into search results across its searchable properties, which also include YouTube and Google Maps. For example, when users search on Google, they can now get results from exact timestamps in YouTube videos. No one but Google can produce these precise results since YouTube is owned by the same parent company.
Can Google hold its market position?
I think it is pretty clear that Microsoft will need to do more if it is to gain any meaningful share of the search engine market from Google. Google has an established user base that it has built up through innovative AI tools that enhance its search capabilities and free products that increase switching costs like Google Chrome, Android, and Google Maps. It is hard to see why it would lose market share if it can continue countering Microsoft's new AI products with copycats of its own.
Investors in Alphabet should be worried about advertising dollars flowing to popular applications like TikTok and Instagram, which have supplemented search engines for some Gen Z users. But these new product announcements from Microsoft feel like a lot of bark with no bite.
