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by olalonde 669 days ago
They're not. Textbook definition: "A market structure characterized by a single seller, selling a unique product in the market." Google Search has competitors and is not even selling its search product.
2 comments

In this context, "selling" can't just mean "exchanging for money", it has to mean something like "exchanging for a valuable consideration." The valuable consideration that you provide in exchange for using Google is your attention on their ads, and your behavioral and personal data that can be sold.

And I would say that Google can fairly be called a unique product in the market. They are the default search engine on almost all browsers and operating systems, their mobile phone operating system owns 70% of the global market share, and most of these devices give Google's search engine preferential treatment, their name is synonymous with searching on the web, their market share is over 90%, they have more data on their users than probably any other company and can provide more personalized search results than anyone else, their web index is clearly more complete than e.g. Bing's (if you do a domain-restricted search, Google often finds twice as many results as Bing).

It's true that alternatives to Google exist, but Google's overwhelming market dominance makes it imo difficult to argue that they aren't a monopoly in practice.

They're dominant but mainly due to the quality/cost of their products, not because competing with them is impossible. Android is open source. There's Bing and many other search engines. Google Mobile Services (Android is open source) and Google Search could disappear tomorrow and would be quickly replaced.
> Google Search has competitors and is not even selling its search product.

The product is not search, it’s ad placements.

Your comment specifically called out their search product. If your argument is that they have a monopoly on ads, I don't believe that's true either.
What I mean is that search is not a product in the sense that you can say “search is free” and not have that be misleading in some way.

YOU are the product, being sold to advertisers, and Google search is the channel through which you are sold.

That's a bit an unconventional take on what free and selling mean, but regardless that wasn't my main point.