We live in a Google Era in which once a small company started by two enthusiastic students in their friend’s garage has become a main interface of the modern reality.
Google has grown so big over the years, so that it is literally everywhere. The company is present in all areas of our Internet life. "Todays' people great ambition is to be the next Google", Michael Moritz, one of the Google's investors, said (Auletta, 2009).
Google is the leading search engine in the U.S. search marketplace with about 65 percent of all the searches conducted. In addition, it continues to dominate global search market with about 67 percent of shares according to comScore (www.comscore.com), a reliable source for internet data.
As stated in the article: “We no longer search for the information on the Web: we Google it” (Auletta, 2009). We love Google for its simplicity and the power it gives to its users. With just one user name and a password, we can get so many nice and useful things all at once- an email, a blogger account, a reader, a photo album, and many other things. But...Is such a monopoly is a good thing? Is monopoly basically a good thing? Even with all the respect to Google?
Google does have a lot of competition and it shares the market with lots of other companies including Yahoo! with 16 percent of shares, Microsoft Bing’ with about 11 percent of shares, AOL with about 3 percent market share, and many others. In fact, in some countries Google is not as quite popular at all. For example, in Russia the largest search engine is Yandex, with 55 percent of local market share and eighth position in the list of the main world's search engines, growing at the fastest rate (94 percent) among the top ten (comScore.com). Chinese search engine Baidu holds the third position and Korea's NHN Corporation is on the fifth place. Despite these facts, Google, with its unique approach, innovative technologies, aggressive acquisition strategy, and a lack of substitute goods, is still a monopoly which creates trends and dictates rules.
