In The U.S., To Search is To Google

Between September 2023 and August 2024, Alphabet's search engine Google had market shares of 95 and 76 percent in the mobile and desktop segments, respectively, in the United States. This dominance by one company recently has become a legal issue: A federal court found the search engine provider guilty of breaking anti-competition laws on August 5, 2024, after an initial complaint was lodged in 2020 by the U.S. Department of Justice and 16 states.

The court decision reflects the long-standing quasi-monopolization of online search by Google, a fact reflected in historical data based on regular updates of five billion page views across 1.5 million websites provided by Statcounter. According to this data set, Google's market share on smartphones rarely dropped below 90 percent in the U.S., with competitors Yahoo! and Bing claiming market shares between three and ten percent in the four years analyzed by Statista.

On desktop devices, other search engine providers have managed to carve out a niche for themselves. However, Google still commands a three-quarter share of search volume originating on laptops and computers. While both Yahoo! and Bing hovered around the ten-percent mark in 2009, 2014 and 2019, Bing has seen a sizable uptick in market share in the twelve months ending August 2024. This could be due to Microsoft incorporating OpenAI's large language model GPT-4 into its search offering in March 2023, resulting in a record market share of 18.2 percent in July 2024, followed by Yahoo!'s four and DuckDuckGo's two percent.