What solutions to Google search engine dominance mean for you

In order to fix the monopoly, the judge could have forced Google to correct its behavior and open competition. For consumers, that meant that instead of using Google.com, we could have gotten more search engine options and could visit a different site to search the web. Google may also have been forced to sell its Chrome web browser and its Android operating system, potentially transforming the web experience and mobile apps.

It became clear on Tuesday that none of that would happen. Judge Amit P. Mehta, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, said in her decision to settle the monopoly that Google would have to share some search data, but did not require it to sell Chrome or Android.

“It’s a burger of nothing,” said Gabriel Weinberg, CEO of DuckDuckGo, an emerging search engine company that testified against Google in the antitrust case.

These are the repercussions you might feel.

Will we see any changes to rival search engines?

According to Mehta’s decision, Google is only required to share some of its search data. That includes a list of websites that ttrackyour search engine to generate results, but not the secret sauce that makes Google.com work.

This means that search engines of rivals such as DuckDuckGo, Microsoft, nd others are unlikely to improve substantially. And since Google is appealing Mehta’s decision, any change is likely to be years in the making.

Will Google.com remain the search engine we see on iPhones?

Probably. Google has paid Apple about $20 billion each year to manage search queries on iPhones, meaning Google.com was the default search engine we saw on the device.

In its ruling, Mehta allowed Google to continue paying companies like Apple and Samsung for preferential placement of its search engine on their devices. Apple has also argued that it decided to include Google.com by default in its web browser Safari because Google had the best search results, so this probably won’t change.

Will artificial intelligence chatbots benefit from the sentence?

AI chatbots such as Perplexity and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which are partly based on search engine data to generate their responses, probably won’t benefit much from Mehta’s decision either. The most complicated parts of search technology, including the way Google.com sorts the websites, are not part of the legal resource.