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.
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.
I don’t want to break Google’s monopoly on search. Google’s search is fantastic. It’s their advertising business knowing too much about me I care about.
That doesn't do much to break up the effective monopoly these services have in their respective markets. You split off Google Search into it's own company and they will still have 90% of the search market share when you're done.
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.
This doesn't seem like it's going to work. Given a choice between search engines pretty much everyone is going to choose Google. I think there are definitely areas that Google acts anti-competitively. But search? The competitors are a URL away. And few use them because Google is just flat out better.
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...
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