Google says it’s Bing’s most popular search term

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Photo: Tobias Schwarz (Getty Images)

It is becoming increasingly difficult for Google to pretend that it is not the anti-competitive bully we all know. Case in point: As part of the company’s ongoing battle to reject the largest antitrust fine ever imposed by the European Union, the company argued in an EU court on Tuesday that it is … the most searched term on the search engine Bings. Yes, really.

We have presented evidence showing that the most common search query on Bing is by far Google, Google lawyer Alfonso Lamadrid told the EU General Court in Luxembourg. According to Bloomberg, who first reported on Google’s arguments, Lamadrid went on to note that people use Google because they choose to, not because they’re forced to.

If this topic sounds familiar, it is because it is almost identical to the talking points used by Google CEO Sundar Pichai in 2018, when European regulators first slapped the tech giant with a $ 5 billion fine (4.3 billions), the largest ever issued by the European Union. The EU complaint alleged that Google had abused its dominance of the Android market in a myriad of ways, including by bundling its flagship search engine as part of its mobile phone operating system.

Pichai, meanwhile, saw things a little differently. In a blog post titled Android created more choice, not less, he argued, just as Lamadrid would argue three years later, that Android users could easily switch to another search engine if they preferred, say, Bing or Brave over. to the Google search engine that was preloaded on their phone.

The fact that Google swallows more than 90% of search engine traffic worldwide, Pichai continued, is only because its users have chosen Google over those competitors.

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At the end of the day, though, the reason people often choose Google is because … Google invested a lot of resources into dominant search in the early days of the internet. By 2000, the company had already indexed more sites than any other search engine at the time.

In 2013, for example, the company had indexed around 30 trillion web pages as part of its vast network. Three years later, that number jumped to 130 trillion pages in total. And these figures have continued to skyrocket ever since. As Gigablast creator Matt Wells told The New York Times at the end of last year: If people use a search engine with a smaller index, they won’t always get the results they want. And then they go to Google and stay on Google. And ultimately, when Google is the default search engine on both Android and Apple operating systems, staying on Google’s web is a lot easier.

Competitor acquisitions and patent tsunamis have been an integral part of Google over the past two decades, and smaller search engines like Bing have struggled to compete. The situation is so absurd, we were sitting here treating a Microsoft search engine like some kind of loser.

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