[zuppy]

It won because competition was really bad. Altavista was not a good search engine.

When you were looking for something, you had to use multiple tools, like Lycos, Hot Bot, Ask Jeeves and the multitude of the web portals that were available back then.

I remember when I first saw Google, it was an instant decision and I never went back, that much was the difference in quality. Unfortunately for us, nobody found a working business model into search in time and this allowed Google to become too big for any viable competition.

[Blikkentrekker]

The problem is that how the market works is that once a monopoly has been established, that it's very hard for a competitor to challenge that, even if he have a better idea.

Large players make lesser costs due to large vertical integration and bulk discounts.

Even if I were to invent a new search algorithm that would be superior to Google's in terms of satisfaction with most searchers, I would be unable to get a wedge in.

This is not so big a problem with say a power company, but with a search engine, it becomes the front page of the internet through which everyone goes — the end result is that Google commands a great deal of political influence simply with how it decides that it's algorithms should work and what pages to prioritize.

Courts ordered Microsoft in the past to provide Windows users with notice of other web browsers, which was the primary way Internet Explorer lost it's dominance — perhaps it is time to order Google to provide users notice of other search engines and web browsers too as a matter of antitrust.