‘Grandpa Google’: Search head testifies that young users see it as out of style
Prabhakar Raghavan, of Google Inc., speaks during the company’s Cloud Next ’18 event in San Francisco, California, July 24, 2018.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
As Google fights claims that it violated antitrust law to maintain its online search dominance, the company’s search lead testified Thursday that young users mock Google as old-fashioned.
Prabhakar Raghavan, a Google senior vice president responsible for for products including search, ads and commerce, said that some young users have referred to the search engine as “Grandpa Google.”
He explained that the term refers to the idea that while Google might be fine to ask a question about homework, young users would prefer to take their more interesting queries elsewhere.
It’s not entirely clear where Raghavan saw the term. Searching “Grandpa Google” on social media sites like TikTok yields videos and memes of grandparents searching for information.
The comment is indicative of a key theme of Raghavan’s testimony, which marked the official first day of Google’s presentation of its defense against claims from the Department of Justice and a group of state attorneys general that it violated antitrust law. The government spent over a month presenting its case alleging that Google illegally leveraged its dominance to maintain its monopoly in search. It’s defined Google’s competitors in search as a handful of much smaller general search engines like Microsoft’s Bing or DuckDuckGo.
But Raghavan testified that threats to Google’s position are very much real and extend far beyond competitors that closely mirror its functions. He said that innovation in the search engine is what has allowed it to maintain market share.
Raghavan testified that Yahoo’s search dominance at one point seemed insurmountable. But, he said, Google was eventually able to surpass Yahoo through better ranking as well as innovations in the search product. For example, Google has conducted research that’s led to features that let it directly answer users’ questions, understand voice queries and lens queries, where users search via a photo they take.
Now that most consumers have a smartphone, users often conduct searches within their own apps, Raghavan said. He gave the example of booking a vacation, where users might use a variety of apps to book their flights and amenities.
“We don’t see users carrying through these journeys entirely on Google,” Raghavan testified. “They go in and out and spend a lot of time on these other platforms.”
When it comes to specialized vertical search engines, such as Yelp or Expedia, Raghavan said, “I see myself as competing with them every day.”
Commercial search is also important to Google, Raghavan said. Amazon is one of the companies that he said he closely watches.
“For Google to be a successful company, we should be good at answering any kind of query, including commercial queries,” Raghavan said. “I believe that if we become second class … we become irrelevant over time.”
The West shouldn’t assume that China is lagging behind the U.S. and Europe on tech developments, Microsoft’s president and vice-chairman warned.
U.S-China tensions in the past few years have centered on the battle between the two nations for tech supremacy, culminating in a slew of export controls on critical technologies. Late last year, China’s Huawei surprised the market with the release of a smartphone whose reviews indicated downloads speeds associated with 5G, sparking speculation of an apparent chip breakthrough that defied U.S. tech sanctions.
Speaking at the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon, Portugal, on Tuesday, Microsoft’s Brad Smith told CNBC that “in many ways,” China is close to or is even catching up on technology.
“I think one of the dangers, frankly, is that people who don’t go to China too often assume that they’re behind,” he told CNBC’s Karen Tso. “But when you go there, you’re impressed by how much they’re doing.”
He predicted that Chinese and American companies will be competing on technology into the distant future and urged U.S. and European companies to collaborate to grow economies and bring new advancements like artificial intelligence to the rest of the world.
Microsoft CEO Brad Smith participates in a meeting at The Westin Palace Hotel, on 20 May, 2022 in Madrid, Spain.
Cezaro De Luca | Europa Press | Getty Images
Microsoft has operated in China since 1992, according to the company’s web page, including through its largest research and development center outside the U.S. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said last year that the firm wasn’t focused on China as a domestic market, but that it provides services to Chinese companies and has a more visible presence locally than do many other U.S. tech giants.
Asked about whether trade and tech transfers — or the movement of data, designs or innovations — with China will get more challenging as Washington transitions between the administrations of U.S. incumbent leader Joe Biden and President-elect Donald Trump, Smith it was too early tor know.
“The truth is, as an American technology company, we can do business in China only when we are offering a service that the Chinese government wants to have there, and the U.S. government wants us to bring there,” he said, adding, “And in some cases they look at, say, a data center to support a Mercedes or a Siemens or a Starbucks or a General Motors — there seems to be a level of comfort. In consumer services, not really.”
He predicted that we’ll live in a world where some technology will move to China, and it won’t be the tech firms that decide.
—CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this article.
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