Google has an estimate 88% of the search market share in the US. (Its higher world wide if it matters.) Many people consider that to be getting into monopoly territory.
You seem to forget that a fundamental number: while Google Search has between 68% and 80% market share in the US, it has between 90% and 95% in most of Europe. The difference between being a monopoly or not.
What is Google's market share? I thought it was under 70%.
It's not like they've actually had a monopoly (90%) for almost 2 decades. Furthermore, it's not like you can't trivially change your search engine in the next 2 minutes.
Depending on the data source, Google has 80%+ share of the search engine market in many countries (such as here in the UK). That's a level often considered monopolistic.
Just because 67% of consumers are choosing Google search despite a myriad of other options, doesn't make it a monopoly nor does it mean they don't have competition. Google is constantly being pushed by its competitors to improve and maintain its marketshare.
Google is also competing with every type of advertising on the planet.
IANAL, but in the US whether you actually hold a monopoly is the key. I think it would be bough to show that Google holds a monopoly in this space. They definitely command the biggest market share, but I'm not sure it would be enough to show that they have a monopoly. 65% (as reported here: http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2011/02/11/googles-lead-s...) is certainly the lion's share, but not quite a monopoly by US standards.
I think Google search is close to a monopoly, and so was Google Reader. Search is pretty much synonymous with Google. Apparently Google has 67% market share, but I'd guess that most people not using Google just use Bing or Yahoo! because that's the default in whatever browser they have. http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2244472/Google-Once-Aga...
Google has 28.9% share, Facebook 25.2%, and Amazon has 10% and growing fast. Not a monopoly, and the incentive is there: if search results are consistently bad, people will stop searching as much, and revenue and market share decline.
Google's market share is slightly more than 3/4 of all search [0]. They have a strong majority of all searches, and they dominant some submarkets of search, but they are far from total market dominance.
As much as people like to bandy that term about, I don't think of (less than) 68% of all searches as a monopoly. Two out of three people is a lot, but it's not nearly enough to force some sort of information control (whether that information is result, or other people exclaiming how much better their search engine is working).
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