[fixermark]

Quick experiment you can try to check if Google is blocking competition:

1) navigate to bing.com

2) do a search

If it works, congratulations; Google isn't blocking competition. The 98% market share is probably because the market is winner-take-all, and people don't see a need to use a new competitor that's even equivalently-effective over one they are already comfortable with.

[xg15]

Imagine you run a website. Some day, for whatever reason, Google is blacklisting you. Are you going to say "eh, no big deal, I'll just have my customers use Bing instead"?

[fixermark]

Your customers already know how to get to your website: yourdomain.com.

Do you mean "Some day, for whatever reason, Google stops directing traffic to your website of people who don't know who you are, for free?"

Sounds like it's time to spend some money on advertising.

Their ability to kick a bunch of traffic towards you or refrain from doing so makes them a market-maker, but they share that with newspaper and television networks. It doesn't make them a monopoly. It's not their fault or responsibility if people don't "tune in" to the Bing channel.

[Merad]

You haven’t interacted with many average users, have you? When instructed to go to “yourdomain.com”, they’ll bring up google and search for yourdomain.com. If it doesn’t appear in google search results, it effectively doesn’t exist to an enormous segment of users.

[fixermark]

I'm the past, we solved problems like this by having industry groups pony up money to educate consumers about options.

Sounds like it's time for companies that can't get in Google search results to start doing ad spots about search engine choice.

[stuckinarut]

You deserved it because you served an ad that google didn't like the style of. Also their adblocker in chrome is fine too because that's not a conflict of interest.

- typical HN response.