This question resolves as "YES" if a publicly-traded competitor to Google has higher search-derived revenue than Google during four consecutive quarters some time before 2028.
For the purposes of this claim, Chinese companies such as Baidu do not count as competitors to Google because they are state-affiliated firms that benefit from Internet protectionism.
Data for resolution of this claim should come from securities filings such as 10-K annual reports filed with the SEC. If Google's competitor files its 10-K in a different quarter than Alphabet (Google's parent company), the competitor's 10-K numbers can be compared with Alphabet's 10-K numbers for the same fiscal year. (For example, if Alphabet's 2018 10-K and its competitor's 2018 10-K show that the competitor had higher search-derived revenues during the 2018 fiscal year, the question will be resolved as "YES" even if Alphabet files in Q1 but the competitor files in Q2.)
If Google's competitor uses a currency other than the USD to denominate its revenues, the comparison between revenues should be calculated using the median exchange rate for the currencies over 365 days as calculated by a reputable financial data service.
"Search" refers to queries that primarily return results from parts of the Internet not operated by the search engine company. For example, Amazon searches will not count if they primarily or exclusively yield results from the Amazon Marketplace. YouTube queries will not count if they primarily or exclusively yield only results from YouTube. This means that if Google's search results are mostly links to Alphabet-related websites, they do not count as search queries.
The burden of proof is on showing that "YES" is true. If no one can produce the data to support "YES," then the market will be resolved as "NO" after the question closes.
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Betting NO for a few reasons:
Even if you built a substantially better search engine than Google, it'd take years to get market dominance
Google's search revenue is optimised beyond belief. Bigger market share alone doesn't necessitate more revenue
Given most current LLM companies have such a small moat, I modally expect it to be easier to copy a competitor's better LLM-based search than for the competitor to bootstrap themselves to be bigger than Google. (I'm assuming better search uses powerful ML, I don't see how else you'd beat Google at its own game)
@OliverBalfour https://kagi.com is superior to Google and doesn't rely on ML. It relies on detecting patterns in SEO: for example, part of its algorithm loads a page with uBlock Origin and downweights it by how many things were blocked.
@OliverBalfour google is in an incentives trap of their own making that makes it very, very hard for them to fix their problems. I don't think they'll pivot, I think they'll go down with the ship, insisting that their vision of search is the true one, and refusing to use their best ai, even as competitors deploy stronger ai sooner and more usably. the competitors will then be able to get paying users, and google's ad model will become a thing of the past.
or google will figure it out. Who knows. they do have an internal prediction market, maybe they'll copy this one internally and react hard enough to make a difference. but my impression is they're too busy being head in the cloud, pun intended.
>> Chinese companies such as Baidu do not count as competitors to Google because they are state-affiliated firms that benefit from Internet protectionism
Can you formulate a general rule here? Do no "state-affiliated firms" count, and if so, how do you decide which firms are "state-affiliated"? What level of "internet protectionism" is required before a company "does not count as a competitor to Google"?
@Boklam No, just China. I don’t want to mess with the parameters after the question has posted. Only China has a large enough closed market to cause trouble here.
So if France creates its own search engine and bans google, that doesn’t affect this claim. That French search engine company is in the running.