Google Search is the largest search engine of the web, and that throughout the years, it's Alphabet's largest source of income.
Not only that many websites pay to be placed higher up on people's search engine results pages, because brands also pay to have Google Search their default search engine.
After all, Google Search uses massive resources, and those resources don't come cheap.
Samsung, the conglomerate company from South Korea, uses Google Search on all of its Samsung devices by default, in a contract that is estimated to be worth around $3 billion per year.
When Samsung is reportedly considering switching to Microsoft Bing, Google's reaction to the threat was "panic."
As soon as South Korea's Samsung Electronics was considering replacing Google with Microsoft-owned Bing as the default search engine on its devices, Alphabet, Inc.'s shares fell over 4% in premarket trading on Monday.
This translates to around $55 billion lost in market value.
The report, first published by The New York Times underscores the growing challenges Google's $162-billion-a-year search engine business in the modern world that is heavily influenced by the growth of AI.
Whereas Google is kind of slow in adopting Bard, Microsoft was fast, and quickly piggybacked the trends OpenAI's ChatGPT made, to embed the technology to its Bing search engine.
As a result, Bing, which has long been a minor player in the search engine industry, has risen in prominence.
For more than many years, Google dominated the industry with a massive share of over 80%, holding an essential monopoly on the search market.
But following the hype of generative AIs, analysts suggest that the company could be falling behind Microsoft in the fast-moving race.
Before this, Alphabet lost $100 billion in value when Google Bard botched by sharing inaccurate information in a promotional video.
CEO Sundar Pichai addressed this in a statement, saying that in almost every area that Google operates, the company was not the first mover.
Instead, Google's history tends to see the company build things that are improvements over existing products.
"If we do that well, success typically follows," he said.
Pichai reflects on the company's past, after Bard's initial introduction was because it wasn't ready.
But regardless, as the competition is heating up, Alphabet has no choice but to give in to the market's demands. Even though Alphabet, Inc. is considered amongst the largest tech companies around, it cannot afford losing more of its market share, because every single percentage of the market it loses, translates to billions and billions of dollars lost to the competition.
Google doesn't want to let Microsoft, its long rival, eat away too many of its shares.
Because of this, Google is working hard to quickly bring Bard to Google Search, a move that could change Google Search forever.
