The following is a guest post by Oliver Mason.

For the last 15 years has come from relative obscurity to being one of the biggest technology companies in the world – dominating natural search in the process. However, Google’s vast size and high turnover of products may be to its detriment – with niche needs being easier to target (and easier to justify internally) for small companies.

Old Labs features can have fiercely loyal followings who demand satisfaction. It’s not only search geeks Google has to worry about losing – Siri will often default to querying Wolfram Alpha rather than Google’s knowledge graph. This means that Google loses thousands of mobile searches to the virtual assistant every day. This may not seem significant given the scale, but even a single percentage of search volume lost could translate into millions of lost ad revenue for the search giant.

Further threats might be seen in Bing being the default provider for IE, or DuckDuckGo being the default search engine in several Linux distributions. Whatever happens from the actions of these rivals, we are likely to see Google upping its game in response to fiercer competition – which can only be a good thing. Check out this infographic from Ladbrokes detailing 13 of the top contenders looking for a slice of Google’s empire.