Webbers Corner

They are acquiring other companies that would make them dominate the market.

Google purchasing number of companies, does not make them a monopoly. Monopoly only happens when a company is dominating one market. For instance, Google may have purchased YouTube, but that does not make them a monopoly on the search market.

They may have majority market share over context-based advertising and the online video market after the purchase of YouTube, but I dont think thats really a bad thing. Monopoly is only detrimental to the economy when the big guys bully the small guys from entering the market through fixed pricing or unfair practies.

What exactly is Google unfairly doing so you can't search using MSN or Yahoo? Nothing really.

I think google is not a monopoly, there are other companies that of the same services and nobody tells you which you must use (yahoo has more or less the same range of products )

the fact is that google is doing extremely good, and people loves them because they are a step ahead of the others, that's it

This is actually a minor point in the general discussion, but i dont know what would happen if we combined the world wide traffic. The global traffic to different national yahoo damains are all added up in yahoo.com except some exceptions, But Google has divided up its traffic amongst different nations. 10 of the top 50 in the ranking is google.xxx

you got it, and consider that on non webmaster related websites (I run a website about an european city) the percentage of IE users is really high (82.8 % on that site)

Okay, all very good points. I seem to be in the minority here so I'm probably wrong, but I'm still not convinced that Google is a monopoly. Not with Yahoo and MSN in the picture. Not in the sense that Microsoft had a monopoly on operating systems. At their peak they had 99% market share.

Does anyone have numbers? I'd be curious to see them. What is Google's percentage of all searches done on the net today? What would you guys consider a monopoly? The last figures I saw were that Google was responsible for almost 50% of all searches on the net (beginning of the year). Very impressive, but I still wouldn't consider that a monopoly. The iPod has 87% market share and that's not even considered a monopoly.

Anyways, just my 2 cents. Please don't beat me up anymore. j/k

They are getting there and I feel more then their success with their own products, they have their competitor’s inability to produce good product and services to thank for their position.