Explained: How Google's own inventions now threaten its search monopoly

Google's 2017 Transformer paper and its open-source Chromium project powered a tech revolution that is now reshaping, and possibly eroding, the company's long-held search dominance

In recent times, Google’s dominance in web search has come under immense pressure with the launch of Perplexity browser (Comet) and OpenAI’s Atlas, among others. The challenge for Google has been mounting mainly on two fronts: the rise of sophisticated large language model (AI) systems using the transformer architecture, and growing calls to open up how browsers and search engines interconnect. 

Paradoxically, it was some of Google’s own earlier moves — releasing the 2017 Transformer paper and open-sourcing its browser engine code (Chromium) — that helped lay the groundwork for both innovations and competitive threats to its revenue model.

What was the ‘Transformer’ paper and how did it change AI?

 

On June 12, 2017, Google researchers published a landmark paper titled Attention Is All You Need, introducing the Transformer neural network architecture. The paper, authored by Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan Gomez, Łukasz Kaiser, and Illia Polosukhin, described a model for sequence-to-sequence tasks such as translation, replacing recurrence and convolutions entirely with attention mechanisms.

 

 

According to Google’s research blog, this architecture could process all words in a sentence at once (via self-attention) rather than step by step, enabling faster training and better results on translation benchmarks.

 

In short, the Transformer made it feasible to train much larger models of language and sequence, paving the way for foundation models that could understand or generate text at scale.

What is Chromium and why did Google open-source it?

 

The Chromium project is the open-source codebase that powers the Chrome browser and other browsers such as Edge, Brave, and Opera. Launched in 2008, Google released the Chrome browser and its source code simultaneously under a permissive licence.

 

By opening Chrome’s engine, Google aimed to strengthen the web platform overall, encouraging more online activity that indirectly boosted its advertising business. Yet, this move also meant other companies could build browsers using the same engine, reducing Google’s exclusive leverage.

How these releases led to AI-powered search rivals

 

The Transformer architecture unleashed a wave of research and commercial development in large language models (LLMs). After Google’s 2017 paper, others — notably OpenAI — built the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT)series, beginning in 2018.

 

The transformer design made it possible to train very large models capable of generating text, answering questions, and summarising content — enabling conversational search-style experiences that go beyond traditional keyword-based engines.

 

As search shifts from “enter term, get links” to “ask question, get summarised answer”, Google’s dominance faces a structural threat. Ironically, the same architecture it originated now powers competitors reshaping the search business.

 

Meanwhile, open-sourcing Chromium allowed rivals to build browsers using Google’s engine but embed new default assistants or LLM-driven search tools, eroding Google’s control over distribution and user experience.

Why Google’s search monopoly is under pressure

 

Google’s search dominance rests on traffic scale, default browser placement, deep user data, and advertising integration. But LLM-powered search experiences are conversational and generative, reducing reliance on ranked search results.

 

Users may now depend more on AI assistants or summarised results than on traditional page listings. Compounding the threat, Google faces intensifying antitrust scrutiny for allegedly maintaining its search monopoly through exclusionary contracts.

The future of search in the age of GPTs

 

As LLMs become more capable, search is evolving from link lists to conversational, context-aware experiences. Users will increasingly receive direct answers or AI-generated insights, reducing click-based engagement — the foundation of Google’s ad business.

 

Additionally, browsers built on Chromium may default to alternative assistants or AI search layers, making it easier for competitors to bypass Google. Even monetisation models may shift — from ad clicks to subscriptions or integrated AI services.

 

While Google remains a global giant, its once unassailable position in search is being tested by the very technologies it pioneered.