Standard Oil owning the railways did not stop anyone from buying oil from many of Standard Oil's competitors either. And yet, Standard Oil put them all out of

Standard Oil owning the railways did not stop anyone from buying oil from many of Standard Oil's competitors either. And yet, Standard Oil put them all out of business somehow. Your comment fails to address market structure and externalities: Baidu and Yandex are both strategic investments by national players for what are de facto protected industries. It's futile to compare Baidu and Google on a 'free market basis', ironically, doing so rhetorically will yield for you some understanding of Google's position. And of course: "Google being popular doesn't stop a competitor from serving the exact same results." This is false, and if it were true, would undermine your own argument. DDG/Bing has some good results, but generally not competitive on the whole with G particularly in the long tail - and the tail is very long. Second - if they did actually have results of 'equal quality' then why would Google own 95% of the market? Because people just randomly and arbitrarily chose Google over competitors for no reason related to quality? Or could it be that market structure and distribution (and long-tail quality, which is an insurmountable problem) are impossible to achieve. Put differently Google is the default option on a lot of platforms, because Google uses it's market power to ensure that. The analogy would be: "The Supermarket sells one kind of water. It's water. The same as all other water and it's the same price. It's called Google water, it's right there at checkout, you can pick up unlimited quantities" - and if you prompt, and ask about it, you may find out that there are 'other brands' of water available, and yes, it's probably of the same quality, but if you wait a few minutes, the clerk can go into the back and maybe find some'. Google owns all of the shelf space. In a close real world analogy - it's for the same reason that you can only get 'Coke' or 'Pepsi' in many situations, and for the same reason there is no '3rd Cola'. Contemplate the situation with that question: "If DDG etc. produce the same results, why does everyone chose G?" because that will unpack a lot for you.