Google monopoly

Through the last ten years Google has been growing fast gaining many loyal users and creating a huge business opportunities around search engine optimization and advertising. It quickly permeated into mainstream culture to become an underlying factor of everyday life.

Growth and Dominance

Google is omnipresent nowadays; it’s the most popular search engine which also offers various services, from web based e-mail to complex website analytics, from a simple image search to a powerful way to make money as a publisher.
All of them start from the search as a key feature. Covering various fields of activity, such as television, radio, hardware (the Google phone) and so on, Google has extended itself to such a level, that it has practically no competitors in search engine market. When it comes to search engines, people overwhelmingly prefer Google. No doubt, it is really effective and widely used. Google is actually the start page for the internet and loading the Google homepage is virtually synonymous with internet access. It clearly remains consumers' favorite, largely because of the search engine's less-cluttered interface which has become its trademark. And between its search, video, e-mail and other services, Google has a role in almost everything people do on the Internet.
Thus it gets to the point of turning into a manipulator of the whole network showing some signs of power and monopoly. The question is where are these market-conquering actions heading to? Google hold a considerable technological lead, both with algorithms as well as their astonishing web-scale computing platform. Beyond this, however, network effects around their industry position and brand prevent any competitor from capturing market share from them - even if it were possible to match their technology platform.
Google's dominance in both areas of consumer search service as well as advertising network gives them an unfair advantage,
and allows them to easily parry any attacks.

Antitrust Attempts

The first steps against Google’s growing monopoly have already been taken by Microsoft launching MSN Live Search.
The next campaign evolves around Microsoft’s offer to buy for $44.6 billion to transform two ailing Internet businesses into a worthy competitor for market leader Google. Microsoft’s far-reaching plans of bidding Yahoo which was a major figure in the open source world for a long time make Google monopoly prevention more actual. This partnership is expected to bring an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market. Thus competitors who want to dethrone Google first need to fight a two-front war: create a search engine that looks and performs better than Google and charges less to advertisers.
Building one of these is difficult, but doing both simultaneously is nearly impossible. So it’s wiser to start with expressing anti-trust through building a better search engine market.

Though, Google leads the control pack of search engine market share, that doesn’t stop other companies from trying to reinvent Internet search with new search engines. Competitive market assumes the existence of both giant and small search engines aimed to improve user’s experience and the way search results are segmented and displayed. These attempts evolve around millions of dollars and require constant investments of financial and human resources, without, however, guaranteeing that newbies will survive the competition.

Innovative search market promotion is carried through the growing sponsorship of new search technologies, which make web content more understandable for applications and more accessible for people. The majority of new advanced technologies are based on human input, such as Semantic web defined by W3C, human edited DMOZ open directory, ICDL standard by OMFICA and so on.

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