Anyone familiar with this blog and the things I say here will be familiar with my take on the search engine wars that have supposedly been going on since Microsoft decided to take on Google and Yahoo! a few years back. But what I find interesting is that people are still surprised by what they’re finding out there.

Take, for instance, this little piece by Jeff Atwood when he shares that Google search sends over 350 times the traffic to one of his community sites than Yahoo! does. Which is even more scary when you consider Yahoo! sends nearly double the traffic that Microsoft Live does.

I’m a little surprised all the people who were so up in arms about the Microsoft “monopoly” ten years ago aren’t out in the streets today lighting torches and sharpening their pitchforks to go after Google. Does the fact that Google’s products are mostly free and ad-supported somehow exempt it from the same scrutiny? Isn’t anyone else concerned that Google, even with the best of “don’t be evil” intentions, has become more master than servant?

Calling the current state of search engine competition a horse race is an insult to horse races. No, what we have here is a one horse race where all the other horses were shipped off to glue factories years ago. Forget “search conference”, you should be throwing a “Google conference”, because there’s no difference.
The Elephant in the Room: Google Monoculture - Coding Horror

Calling Google a monopoly is not wrong. That is exactly what it has become. But it has done so fairly and there is nothing at all that would stop it from losing that monopoly in a rapid hurry if something better was produced by someone else.

As I said in May last year, Google is a monopoly because they have created the best product available today. The rule the roost as a result of that. However, they do not tie up your data and make it difficult for you to change. They do not put undue restrictions on what you can do with any information they hold about you. In fact, they go to great pains on their own part to make it as easy and as simple to migrate your information in any of their services to any other product available by their competitors.

Can Microsoft say the same?

Microsoft achieved their monopoly in the desktop and internet browser space through unfair practices and anti-competitive licensing schemes that made the products of their competitors less attractive in a number of ways. By giving away Internet Explorer, they put Netscape out of business. By use of contractual agreements, they made it financially more expensive for an OEM to include a competitors operating system on their computers. We are still feeling the ramifications of all of these actions today. Some of Microsoft’s past behaviour is only just now appearing before the legal system in the European Union.

And all their actions made it difficult in many ways to move to a competitors product. Financial investment in software, patented file formats no other competing product could open… The list goes on.

If Google fell over tomorrow, I could still search on the internet. As we’ve recently discussed though, it would seriously inconvenience me and nearly everyone reading this site.

I understand the sentiment that Jeff has though. It does seem a farce to keep talking about other search engines and to hold “search conferences” when the reality is that we truly do have a Google monoculture. Or as Sridhar Vembu of ZOHO said, “now we are in the Google Era.”