Does the Day of Reckoning Draw Near?

Ryan Modafe

January 26, 2024

Google has become ingrained into the fabric of society as the go-to search engine for finding information. Whether looking for the score of tonight’s basketball game, finding which shoes to wear to prom, or perusing various sites for solutions to calculus homework, Google has dominated the browsing industry by a wide margin, heavily supported by its current 1.84 trillion dollar market cap. By nature, Google is heavily intertwined with involvement in the tech industry and as such has also been a leading contributor to the advancement of AI technology. Having delved deeply into the AI realm, Google has not been without competitors and recently, an AI-based search engine company, Perplexity, has claimed that "Google is going to be viewed as something that's legacy and old.” On the contrary, Google currently stands mightily, steadily going forward, and is nowhere near collapse.

There seems to be no doubt in the promises of this company for shareholders as at the moment, Google’s stock price sits at a comfortable 147.97, quite close to its all-time high of 150.71 in November of 2021. In fact, it has such a large domain of control over the text space that many have dubbed it “the most powerful company in the world” and not without reason. Google has amassed practically a monopoly over the information flow in the world and as such has an embedded and fortified position in this space unlike any other browser making it almost impossible to topple. In 2023, over 63% of the internet used Google browser with Safari trailing in second place with a mere 20%. Such gripping control over the browsing space indicates that Google will likely be staying for the long run. While Perplexity boasts 10 million active users with little marketing, it stands as a far cry to Google’s towering 3.2 billion users which will likely keep growing. 

Although competitors continuously enter the browsing market trying to slay the seemingly invincible titan Google, these efforts are futile due to the legacy Google has established which will fail to dwindle for much time to come. Being the premier search engine entails being a core aspect of the functionality of the modern world as a whole which cannot be torn down so simply. With the world revolving around Google, almost no innovation can alter the dependence of the masses on the product that houses their entire lives. As a result, preposterous claims of Google’s downfall in both the near and far future are just that. Preposterous.