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The search engine landscape 2025

December 2024
 by Jorge Repiso

The search engine landscape 2025

December 2024
 By Jorge Repiso

The online search landscape has undergone significant transformation in 2024, shaped by advancements in AI technologies, increased competition, and heightened regulatory scrutiny. The rise of powerful generative AI tools is reshaping how we find information online, which is increasingly mediated by algorithms fine-tuned to deliver highly relevant results, predictive recommendations, and interactive responses to complex queries. This article offers a glimpse into what to expect in the search engine landscape in 2025.

Google will try to maintain their hegemony in online search

Google remains the most-used search engine despite a challenging 2024. In August, Google lost a landmark US antitrust case over its search dominance, where a federal judge labelled Google a “monopolist”. Prosecutors argued that Google paid over USD $26 billion to network carriers, browser developers and mobile phone manufacturers for anti-competitive deals.

As a result of the ruling, the Department of Justice (DOJ) is considering “behavioural and structural remedies”, potentially requiring Google to divest parts of its business, such as Google Chrome, Android, and ending agreements that make it the default search engine on devices like the iPhone. US President-elect, Donald Trump, is expected to attempt to block any breakup.

Challengers aim to capture market share

Other search engines are gaining traction by partnering with OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, Google Gemini’s direct competitor. ChatGPT uses Bing index to find content, and while the newly released ChatGPT Search uses its own algorithm, it still relies heavily on Bing. Microsoft has also gained some ground by further integrating Microsoft Copilot (largely powered by ChatGPT) into Bing.

Privacy-focused search engines like DuckDuckGo keep attracting users concerned with data security and privacy.  Earlier this year, DuckDuckGo released a platform that allowed its users to interact with a number of AI models while ensuring user data remains secure. DuckDuckGo and its chatbot providers cannot use user data to train their models – this includes metadata and server or IP addresses, to ensure all queries appear to originate from the company itself rather than individual users. For privacy-conscious users, ChatGPT also introduced a “temporary chat” feature for free and paid users that will not store data, akin to browsing the internet in incognito mode.

These advances and partnerships between major AI providers and competitor search engines have started eating away at Google’s search market share, which has decreased from 91.47% at the beginning of 2024 to 89.34%. Bing and Yandex have made the most significant gains.

Increased AI regulation is on the horizon

The mass adoption of generative AI tools is drawing increased regulatory scrutiny, especially in areas like misinformation and deepfakes, bias, and accountability. On 1st August 2024, the European Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) took effect to foster responsible artificial intelligence development and deployment in the EU. Other jurisdictions have followed suit, with the UK signing the first international treaty with the Council of Europe to address AI’s potential risks to human rights, democracy and the rule of law. In 2025, we anticipate further legislation to address these risks and enhance user privacy.

The future is long term

AI’s impact in the search landscape shows no signs of slowing down, as the biggest players ramp up efforts for the long term. In October 2024, Google announced a long-term energy agreement with Kairos Power, which will build several small nuclear reactors to support Google’s AI ambitions. Microsoft and Amazon have reached similar agreements to power their own initiatives.

How users react to the introduction of more AI-powered elements on internet services will be key for further development. Search may evolve into a hybrid model where users begin with AI tools for exploration and turn to traditional search engines for verification. In any case, AI is here to stay.

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