Digital marketing concept, Businessman using laptop with Ads dashboard digital marketing strategy … [+]
How is search on the open web evolving for advertisers in 2025 and beyond? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Answer by Steven Read, Chief Product Officer in New York, on Quora:
It’s important to understand the history of search and how it’s remained nearly stagnant for a decade to contextualize where it’s heading next.
Twenty-five years ago, search transformed the digital world.
Larry Page and some Stanford colleagues invented a brilliant search engine that allowed anyone with a web browser to access relevant results to any query instantly for free.
They founded Google in 1998, and their “back rub” and “page rank” algorithms were so much better than competing search engines that the word “Google” became a verb that is now synonymous with search.
In 2000, Google began monetizing search results with search ads using an innovative revenue model invented by Overture called pay per click (PPC) advertising.
PPC advertising was a transparent, auction-based system that allowed advertisers to bid on keywords that were relevant to people’s search queries — and only pay when the person clicked on the ad. Google quickly dominated the search advertising market thereafter.
In the mid-2000s, Google extended its digital advertising empire with the acquisitions of YouTube for video ads and Doubleclick for display ads. The only losers seemed to be news and editorial publications who traded analog and dollars for digital pennies when they raced to give away content for traffic.
With full market penetration, Google needed to lock out competitors, raise ad rates, and turn more search real estate into billable clicks to grow search ad revenue.
Over the last decade, Google search has grown its revenue 5x and Alphabet’s enterprise value shot up 5x as Google successfully eliminated all meaningful — and any potential — search competitors.
In this last decade of value extraction, the losers were users and advertisers. But search doesn’t equal just Google. Search isn’t even just a search engine. Sixty percent of consumer searches begin on the open web.
Building native search experiences on the open web so that users can find relevant results without being forced or funneled to legacy search engine results pages will open up the broader search market to $675bn.
The state of search now is populated with frustrated advertisers who lack transparency and control over their search advertising budgets, publishers who can no longer monetize and scale effectively, and users who must deal with a poor consumer search experience with less relevant results.
We are now fully entering this new era of search, made possible by technological advancements like generative AI and the DOJ ruling that Google illegally maintained a monopoly in the search engine advertising and search text ads markets.
We’re finally seeing the door open to transparent innovation and market competition we haven’t seen in over a decade. This grants more power to browsers, who can curate search experiences for their users. And for advertisers, this means they get to move money away from Google when it’s too pricey or insufficiently transparent.
The search market is primed for this paradigm shift — a shift that will unequivocally prove that there is indeed a better way to search. That better way is search on the open web, cultivated and powered by valuable moments of consumer intent.
This question originally appeared on Quora – the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
