> This is not a monopoly in the standard sense, and since anyone can crawl the web and build their own index Google isn't hindering anyone from competing. It'

> This is not a monopoly in the standard sense, and since anyone can crawl the web and build their own index Google isn't hindering anyone from competing. It's close. It's as close to a monopoly as MS was with IE built into Windows 98 - while you can find and use alternatives, it's on you to do this, and Google is the default all over the place. Remember, too, how much power this gives Google - the top five search results for a keyword are intensely powerful, for everything from directing commerce to a particular site, to controlling news narratives, and more. Companies pay millions for SEO "professionals" and software like Moz / Stat to ensure they're in the top rankings. The latter in turn need to defeat google's anti-bot stuff to get search results, so they're in their own arms race... The whole ecosystem is dirty and gross and gives too much power to too few people with too much money. It'd be fine if the average consumer was conscious of this and could reasonably make the choice to use a different engine, but this is highly controlled as well - think of the Google donations to Mozilla that they may not be able to live without.