Neeva, Apple Search … The New World of Search Engines

Salesforce ex-chief data scientist introduced you.com in 2020, a so-called revolutionary search engine aiming to take down the almighty Google Search. In the meantime, many rumours are announcing an upcoming search algorithm from Apple – to replace Google Search from all devices from the Cupertino company. In the meantime, reports indicate Amazon is the starting point of more than 40% of product purchases in the US.

Is that the end of Google? Should brands, marketers & ecommerce managers fear the potential fall of the tech search giant?

What are these new search engines?

You.com

You.com has been designed to make it easier for Web users to find media articles & ecommerce products that are the best for them. Using AI, their search engine aims to learn from past browsing behavior to offer more relevant search results. Of course this may lead to a bigger information biais, a phenomenon already existing with Facebook.

Neeva

Launched in beta by ex-Googlers, Neeva is radically different from Google as it offers an access to an ad-free Web portal, while charging users for a monthly subscription.

Brave Search

Similarly to Neeva, Brave Search ensures users not to track their queries i.e. not linking queries to personal information.

Apple Search

It is not yet clear if Apple will truly launch its own search engine to compete with Google, or the brand will buy out an existing search engine like DuckDuckGo. What is sure is that Apple is willing to stop relying on Google services in order to promote its own model of a Web protecting user privacy.

The company has already launched new features with iOS to limit the efficiency of retargeting & cookie usage. We would not be surprised if Apple would launch a search engine ensuring a better privacy, without ads or promoted content based on past browsing behavior.

In the meantime, several large websites have reported a spike of crawl volume from bots using an applebot user agent. It is yet not clear if Apple does that to improve its vocal search with Siri, or if the brand wants to launch its own Web-based search engine.

Search has never been so important for brands

Covid-19 has changed the game. FMCGs are getting disintermediated faster than ever.

Today, 8 out of 10 Western European consumers buy online, already accounting for 14% of retail sales. 55% of the ecommerce market is captured by companies with fewer than 100 employees.

Meanwhile, we notice significant rise of unbranded search queries (+116% in 2020 according to Google), revealing consumers with a lower fidelity to brands.

Brands face a lack of data about what consumers want to keep up with the pace of innovation.

Search data have become the true reliable mirrors of demand.

Significant: high-volume data source of 80k search queries every second 👨‍🔬
Reliable: unbiased voice of the consumer, not of media or influencers 👩‍⚖️
International: shared data referential across all emerging & advanced economies 👨‍✈️

Search engines are not limited to Google or Bing. They are more than 10.000 search engines in our world, helping users to find relevant content on specific media websites, marketplaces or even mobile apps.

All these data sources represent a huge amount of material to be exploited by brands to discover what consumers truly want.

A unified search data platform to rule them all

We built Trajaan as a SaaS platform to extract strategic value from search data.

With Trajaan, users can map all existing search queries related to a product category & segment these into meaningful groups.

Then our platform is tailored to help users monitor interest in each segment over time.

With our platform, users can also deep dive into local search trends by comparing search volume across dozens of regions or territories. By comparing search volume with local population, Trajaan also provides territories with the highest affinity for specific products or services.