How Will Google Business Look Like In Ten Years?

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How Will Google Business Look Like In Ten Years?

This is an extremely complicated answer to give. On the many possible ways, it might evolve let’s start from two macro trends: AI/machine learning and voice. What I’m referring here is not Google as Alphabet (the overall company). But Google as the search engine and where it might be headed next.

Over the last two decades of its life, Google as a search engine has grown exponentially until it made of the search experience as the main feature of the web.

When it launched many existing giants, like AOL, saw search as a secondary feature, until the market gave its feedback, by giving Google massive success and wiping out – at the time – current web giants (just a few weeks ago Verizon wrote off from its balance sheets Yahoo and AOL).

Thus, we went from a web made of portals, to an internet made of search. Until social media kicked in and it created a different kind of experience.

Since social media has become the main competitor to search (Google and Facebook have a duopoly in digital advertising), Google realized it needed to also bet on it. It did that with Google Plus, which this year is shutting down!

This left Google with its main search engine, which is now transitioning to become more and more like a portal.

Where Google aimed at generating as many clicks toward sites listed on its engine, this number is decreasing from desktop and even more on mobile. Indeed, many marketers are assisting to the rise of the so-called zero-click searches.

In this scenario, where users are consuming more and more content from mobile, and voice is approaching, creating a lock-in experience has become – I argue – a priority for Google.

In short, wherein the past Google could afford to give us an answer to users’ queries pages and pages of content. Now if it wants to survive to the next wave of the web, it will need to give one answer. And it better be good!

From a first analysis performed by Loup Ventures:

Google Assistant seems to be performing quite good compared to other assistants on several kinds of queries:

Source : Loup Ventures

As Google AI is becoming smarter and smarter, think of Google Duplex, another element to look at will be content generation and automation.

Where Google has to still rely on a large network of publishers to enrich its organic listing, what if its AI would be finally able to generate and product good organic content, at least appealing on commercial queries in the future?

Just like Uber is betting on autonomous driving, Google bet on AI for content generation might cut one of the most expensive channels for content acquisition altogether and improve dramatically its cost structure, which is as of today looks like that:

Google ten years from now

Assuming Google will have survived and thrived the era of voice, AI/Machine learning and IOT (it might be too early for blockchain domination).

We’ll have an answer engine embedded in any tool that surrounds us. Rather than a search mechanism where users look for something. That engine will have become so good at predicting what we want that it will be more of a discovery mechanism.

Thus, more and more Google will use its database to make us discover what we would like to see. No more keywords, but just a fluid communication between the human and the machine, just like a human would talk to another human.

Rather than consuming content on desktop or mobile (desktop might still be the preferred way for professional use, yet the market compared to entertainment and leisure might become a niche), we’ll be moving our hands, talking to our devices and having them make us discover things, rather than search for them.

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