The history of the search competition is covered in detail in Google's proposed "Findings of Fact" file. This includes information on Google's origins, developments, competitive environment, search ad business, distribution agreements, and more.

The sections that discussed web search businesses like DuckDuckGo and Neeva and their business advancements caught our attention in particular.

Certain information about DuckDuckGo that we already knew is revealed in the filing, such as the fact that it has been profitable since 2014 and that search advertising, specifically Microsoft search ads in the US, is presently its main source of operational income. But Google's plan also makes an effort to present a picture of a firm that prioritized paying back investors rather than investing in innovative search technology.

According to the petition, DuckDuckGo made $10 million in revenue in 2018, but instead of using that money to enhance its search engine, the "majority of that money was distributed to DuckDuckGo's shareholders." A portion of the $100 million round of funding that DuckDuckGo raised in 2020 was once more distributed to stockholders. (The precise percentage has been withheld.) According to the statement, money from stock sales by stockholders to other venture capital firms was not utilized to enhance the search engine. However, it also refutes this claim, pointing out that in 2018, a third of DuckDuckGo's 50 staff were devoted to enhancing the search engine.

Even still, DuckDuckGo hasn't developed its own "comprehensive web index" for organic search results, according to the document, which is hardly a point in Google's favor given how profitable the company is. Additionally, Apple's SVP of Services Eddy Cue said, "No, we did not... that is not a good choice for customers," in response to a question about whether the company would think about setting DuckDuckGo as the default in the Safari browser. Hurt!

Also included is the extent of DuckDuckGo's operations. According to the filing, the business calculated that 100 million people worldwide would be using its search engine by 2021. Although 10% of Americans are estimated to be search engine users, the search engine only receives roughly 2.5 percent of all general search queries in the United States. The reason for this, according to DuckDuckGo's management, is that users frequently utilize its search engine for some but not all of their inquiries.

Even with the launch of the Android "choice screen," where it is available as an option, as of August 2023, DuckDuckGo only accounted for 0.6% of mobile search inquiries in Europe. Depending on the nation, its share of search inquiries in Europe in 2023 varied from 0.5% to 2.5%.

Google intends to demonstrate through the presentation of these results that users are selecting its search engine due to its superiority and innovation rather than its market dominance.

It also cites DuckDuckGo's privacy policy as one of its shortcomings, saying that by not using data such as search sessions, a signed-in experience, and more, the policy results in "significant trade-offs to search quality." If anything, though, these and other disclosures in the filing highlight how challenging it is for a rival to establish a search firm that can compete with Google's.

Neeva, a search engine created in 2019 by former Google employees Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan, is another startup that exemplifies the issue. Neeva's concept and founding team initially gave the impression that the company had promise. According to the court complaint, CEO Ramaswamy led Google's advertising, commerce, search infrastructure, and privacy teams while holding key positions at the company from 2003 to 2018.

With their extensive technical knowledge and experience, the team came up with a proposal to provide users with an ad-free Google alternative by making money through subscriptions. Neeva claimed to have more than 600,000 users by 2022, although the majority of them were not paying clients at that time.

Further information regarding Neeva's development is provided by the court document, which mentions funding from prestigious venture capital firms like Greylock Ventures and Sequoia Capital in addition to Ramaswamy's own personal investment. Ramaswamy had testified throughout the trial that the corporation thought it could compete successfully on search quality in the United States and some other areas with just a 2.5% share of general queries.

In the beginning, the business offered to use Microsoft's Bing to deliver results while building its own search engine. By 2022, it was ranking online results using its own methods and thought that, with the use of machine learning, natural language processing, and other approaches, it was on par with Google and superior to Bing.

It obtained anonymized data in the form of datasets that were made available for purchase in order to create and train its machine learning models. Neeva was innovative here, thus Google could not argue otherwise. Neeva AI, a generative AI feature that the startup debuted last year, is comparable to what Google is now trying with its Search Generative Experience (SGE) in that it uses AI to directly answer some inquiries on search result pages.

Neeva was able to draw some users as a result. According to the complaint, Ramaswamy had stated that the platform had "several million unique users per month" during its height. Regretfully, the startup's failure to compete with free search led to the closure of its consumer division, a transition to the enterprise sector, and its eventual sale to Snowflake. The startup was unable to secure the venture capital funding required to grow its business.

According to Ramaswamy's testimony, "my co-founder, Vivek, and I reluctantly came to the conclusion that we would not be able to build up a business fast enough to be able to raise capital to support the growth of the product and the team." "We actually started talking about a possible acquisition in March, but we shut down the consumer search engine in May of this year, refunded the money our customers paid us, and got acquired by Snowflake, an enterprise data company," he said.

The filing also tells us that Neeva was still a modest player in the search business, with less than a million dollars in subscription income at the time and expanding.

According to the filing, the business sold itself to Snowflake for about $184.4 million in cash, which was more than twice the amount that had been invested. Compared to earlier estimates that estimated the amount at $150 million, this is somewhat more.

While not a startup, the document also discusses Yahoo's (TechCrunch's parent firm) decline in the search market, pointing out that it ceased web crawling following a 2009 agreement with Microsoft for sponsored search advertisements and algorithmic search. Yahoo was able to focus on other more well-liked products, such as Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo News, and Yahoo Mail, by reducing its search investment thanks to this collaboration. (Notably, a large portion of the Yahoo part has been redacted.) It also mentions that Mozilla once had a partnership with Yahoo but ended it because of the poor quality of their searches.

Google makes an effort to claim that it competes with a variety of different products, such as specialized mobile applications and websites that offer a particular kind of search, such as Yelp, Airbnb, Amazon, Expedia, Booking.com, Hotels.com, and others, despite the fact that it has few genuine competitors in the market for search. Additionally, it asserts that it is in competition with ChatGPT, an AI platform, and social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok, the latter three especially with younger users.

Liz Reid, the vice president of search at Google, reported in 2021 that, among everyday TikTok users between the ages of 18 and 24, 63% claimed they had used the platform as a search engine in the previous week.

It remains to be seen if Google's claim that it does not have a monopoly in search and, more broadly, in search advertising, which forms a significant portion of this case, will be persuasive enough to the court. Although Google dominates the search business, as these examples demonstrate, there are still competitors vying for market share. But the trial had previously shown that Google was using a lot of money to keep its share of the search industry, as seen by the $18 billion it paid Apple to remain the default search on iPhones. In the meantime, Apple debated purchasing Bing from Microsoft in 2020 and had also thought about setting DuckDuckGo as the default search engine in Safari before deciding against it in favor of continuing to write checks to Google.