[gojomo]

Low barrier?! Giant companies like Yahoo, staffed with large teams of search technology pioneers, have been scared out of search competition. Google touts its massive custom infrastructure. The arms race between Google and SEO creates a massive pollution backwash of false quality signals on the web, that make things way harder for any upstart which lacks Google's decade-plus of proprietary know-how and billions in hardware.

And that's before considering the contractual defaults across software (Firefox/toolbars/bundleware) and subsidized hardware (Android), that few people change. (Many don't even know it can be changed, or don't even know the difference between "Google" and "the Internet"!)

Those are all big barriers to entry, even if they've been earned by excellent technology and business strategy.

[angryasian]

while DDG started by 1 guy and entrants like blekko or qwiki can differentiate in other ways and enter and compete easily.

Again everything you are saying is because of superior product/employees and innovation. Your entire argument is based off no one else can come up with a better product so lets punish them

[gojomo]

Where'd I say "let's punish them"? I'm just accurately labeling the situation.

Google's dominant position constitutes a 'monopoly' and 'monopoly market power', in a common understanding of those words, and in the senses often used by economists and regulators. Their search market has very high 'barriers to entry', in terms of costs-to-compete, ability-to-reach-customers, returns-to-scale, and network-effects. (Separate from all the specific things I mentioned which make it extremely hard for entrants to get a foothold, you can also just look at the profits. Whenever there are big profits, there are business 'moats', or else someone else would grab a bunch of those profits themselves.)

This makes them a likely target of government antitrust action – an observation which is true whether or not such antitrust laws, and related enforcement actions, are a good idea or not. Again, I'm interested in accurately describing what exists, not making moral or policy judgements.

Qwiki? Really? They never offered ranked search, abandoned their 'visual explainer' product long ago, and are now part of Yahoo with their multimedia storytelling app.

DDG, Blekko, and all search sites other than Google/Bing/Yahoo/Aol/Ask are together less than 0.3%-1% of the US market. And yet this market is wildly profitable for Google – and almost no one else. (Bing, the distant 2nd-place, has lost hundreds of millions every quarter since 2007.) That's not an indication of vibrant easy-entry competition: one company dominates market-share and profits, and the number of competitors and new entrants have been declining over time.

By the way, the founder of your 'compete easily' example Blekko also disagrees with your assessment, and has since the outset of Blekko. In this 2007 post he describes how it's impossible to compete for market share head-on with Google due to its "immense and amazing power" in a "winner-take-all market":

http://www.skrenta.com/2007/01/winnertakeall_google_and_the_...

[angryasian]

>DDG, Blekko, and all search sites other than Google/Bing/Yahoo/Aol/Ask are together less than 0.3%-1% of the US market. And yet this market is wildly profitable for Google – and almost no one else.

I think this sums it up perfectly. Theres plenty of competition just no one can compete because google offers a superior product. As soon as google offers an inferior product or a competitor offers a better product people will abandon ship. They do nothing anti-competitive nor blocking entrants into the market.