Bing it on

Google, the king of search, is fighting back after Microsoft's bid for a bigger slice of the pie.

- Peter Griffin

How many Google searches do you do in a typical day? The answer, for the average Google H search user, is four.

For me, it is in the dozens. I'm a Google super user and have been for well over a decade, during which time the world's most popular search engine appears to have hardly changed.

Outwardly, it's still a simple application with an empty, inviting search box, the Google logo and lots of white space. Behind the scenes, legions of software engineers tweak the algorithms and indexing protocols to keep Google at the top of its search game. With 93% of the market, that has been an incredibly successful enterprise for Google's parent company, Alphabet. Search-related advertising made up 71% of Google's ad revenue in 2020, a cool US$104 billion ($165 billion).

Google has long suffered from incumbent-itis. As the king of search, it has no real incentive to change its search engine, which registers about 100,000 searches a second, even if the experience is in need of an overhaul.