A group of researchers says it has identified a hidden reason we use Google for nearly all web searches: We’ve never given other options a real shot.
Their research experiment suggests that Google is overwhelmingly popular partly because we believe it’s the best, whether that’s true or not. It’s like a preference for your favorite soda.
And their research suggested that our mass devotion to googling can be altered with habit-changing techniques, including by bribing people to try search alternatives to see what they are like.
How to persuade people to try something other than Google is an imperative in the trial that started Monday to undo Google’s illegal monopoly in web search, the company’s best-known product. (Google said it plans to appeal the decision that it broke the law.)
Some of the government authorities that successfully sued Google were inspired by the research. That means you could soon be paid to try Microsoft Bing or another alternative.
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Bribing people to try Bing actually worked
About 9 out of every 10 web searches we do is through Google, according to 2020 figures cited in the monopoly ruling against Google last year. We use the next closest competitor, Bing, for just 6 percent of searches.
So a group of academics – from Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT – designed a novel experiment to try to figure out what might shake up Google’s popularity.
They recruited nearly 2,500 paid participants and remotely monitored their web searches on computers for months. The core of the experiment was paying some participants- most received $10 – to use Bing rather than Google for two weeks.
After that period, the money stopped, and the participants had to pick either Bing or Google.
The vast majority in the group of people who were paid to use Bing for 14 days chose to go back to Google once the payments stopped, suggesting a strong preference for Google even after trying an alternative. But a healthy number that group – about 22 percent – chose Bing and were still using it many weeks later.
The size of those Bing choosers surprised the researchers, according to one of them, Leon Musolff, an assistant professor in business economics and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania.
He told me that their findings could be summed up by a quote from one of the Bing-trying participants: “I realized Bing was not as bad as I thought it was.”
Microsoft declined to comment. (Under the company’s rewards program, you can earn gift cards for using Microsoft products, including Bing. It’s laborious.)
The researchers concluded that we have little personal experience to challenge our belief that Google is the best. When people tried another option, the researchers said, it made a meaningful change in some of their search habits and reduced their perception of Google’s superiority.
The researchers did not test other search engines. Some of the academics have worked for Microsoft’s research division, but Musolff said that didn’t influence the experiment.
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Translating the research into real life
While this was just one imperfect research experiment, the government took notice.
Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser (D), who is leading the group of states that sued Google alongside the Justice Department, said the research helped inspire a demand by the states to fix Google’s search monopoly.
They asked a judge to require Google to bankroll a consumer information campaign about web search alternatives, including “short-term incentive payments.” The government is also demanding more dramatic changes to Google, including a sale of its Chrome web browser.
The company says that Google search is superior because of its investments and innovation and that people “use Google because they want to, not because they have to.”
“As the study shows, forcing people to use an inferior search engine would create a bad experience for everyone,” said Julie Tarallo McAlister, a Google spokesperson.
The company also pointed out that the research experiment estimated that if people were automatically funneled to Bing instead of Google, it would cause a “large reduction in consumer surplus.” (In non-economics speak: People would hate it.)
But the researchers had a novel two-part suggestion to blunt Google’s search dominance while still keeping us happy: Nudge you to try an alternative to Google for a while and then make an informed choice of Google or something else.
That still wouldn’t be bad for Google. The researchers estimated that after the two-stage suggestion, we’d still use Google for nearly 75 percent of web searches. That’s huge, though it’s less than the roughly 90 percent now.
If you use Google search, as I do, maybe all these tactics to persuade you to switch seem artificial and manipulative. Yup.
Google has lost three out of three major monopoly lawsuits in the United States – in web search, its advertising technology for websites and its Android app store. (Google has appealed or said it will appeal them all.)
A conclusion of the cases, as one judge said last year, is that “the world as it exists today is the product of monopolistic conduct.” The question for courts, and us, is how to alter a world skewed by Google’s declared monopolies. It might take unnatural acts.
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One tiny win
As the research experiment found, many people don’t know much about alternatives to Google and don’t bother considering them.
In the researchers’ words, we tend to be “inattentive” about search engines. (In normal human words, we don’t wake up every day thinking about which search engine to use.)
You may not always realize you’re using Google, either. The company pays about $26 billion a year so that you automatically search with Google when you use your iPhone or Mac, Samsung phone and Firefox web browser. Inertia is hard to overcome, and the judge who said Google cheated to win our affection in web search zeroed in on the effects of those payments.
I encourage you to join me in a two-week (unpaid) experiment mirroring the research: Change your standard search engine to something other than Google and see whether you like it.
I’m going with DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused web search engine that uses Bing’s technology.
To change your search engine if you use the Chrome web browser: Click the three vertical dots in the upper right corner of your screen and pick Settings. Choose “search engine” and pick one of the listed options.
Or follow these instructions to change the standard search option away from Google on an iPhone or Android phone:
For iPhone: Tap on Settings > Scroll down and tap on Safari > Tap on Search Engine > Make your choice
For Android: Go to Chrome > Tap on the three-dot menu button > Tap on Settings > Tap on Search Engine > Make your choice > You may also need to replace your home screen search box. Return to home, long press on the Google widget and tap Remove. > Tap on the Play Store and search for your chosen search engine, such as DuckDuckGo > Install DuckDuckGo’s app > Go back to your home screen. Tap and long press to edit it, then tap Widgets > Search for DuckDuckGo and tap on its search bar widget > Tap and hold on the new search bar to drag it to your home screen.
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