Google's search engine at this point is nearly impossible to beat. The only way to outcompete it would be to come up with a better system for finding information than full-text search.
But either way, that's not causing Google to break any anti-trust laws. They don't have to make it easy for competitors, just not unfairly use their power to stomp on them.
One could even make the argument that the reason Google has done such a good job at search over the years is because Larry and Sergey are very afraid of being disrupted by another Larry and Sergey. They have to stay on their toes and they know it.
Sure, I'll agree that they're not breaking any laws.
From an accounting perspective, their products would be ads. The groceries would be a cost of good to sell their actual product, ads. This is how 99% of the business world works.
> From a consumer perspective, the product is search.
I'm sure cows think the product is grass/hay/corn from a "consumer perspective", but cows are beautiful dumb inventory with kind eyes.
I mean, the company that comes along and figures out how to do search better than Google is going to take practically the entire internet by storm. Maybe some sort of computational knowledge, data-driven AI will find its way into being, or something.
I'm quite excited about it though. I don't think it's impossible at all. I don't think Google really can be split apart either, since Alphabet sort of already did that. Google isn't forcing anybody out of business, and by their own methodology, that would be counterproductive. I mean, putting optic lines down only forces Comcast and the like to step their game up a bit, they are more than welcome to continue doing business, and customers are more than welcome to tell Google to fuck off if they'd prefer their competitors.
There are currently other search engines that still exist, like YaCy and DuckDuckGo, ixquick, and others. They wouldn't be around if they didn't think that there's something they can do better than Google.
Goog has ~20 years of patents behind them, and anyone coming up now will have to figure out a way of being 'better' while not infringing on any patent. And/or, they'll need to have enough deep pockets behind them to weather patent infringement suits.
First, it's completely false that there are only 1-2 possible good search providers, given that there are already several good search providers that exist today.
You may think Google is better than Bing or DuckDuckGo[0] or Baidu, but there's no arguing that they aren't good.
And the barriers to entry for search are about as low as possible. Google can't stop you from writing your own web crawler, and there's no law preventing you from indexing pages yourself. Yes, that requires time and money, but so does every large market opportunity.
[0] No, this is not redundant, because DuckDuckGo does use its own crawlers in addition to the search results it gets from Bing.
That's not the point. As long as it's nearly impossible for another company to become market leader, there isn't competition there in any meaningful sense. Competition would mean that Bing or DuckDuckGo or Baidu could reasonably overtake Google. One of the only reasons Bing has any market share at all is that their search engine comes on IE by default, and Baidu is primarily used in China because China is protectionist. DuckDuckGo is tiny in comparison.
EDIT: The issue here is that offloading costs to someone other than the consumer - in this case, advertisers - distorts the market so that there's little/no reason to use the second-best search engine. If people had to pay what their searches cost them, some people might realise they could save money by not going for the top option, and we'd have reasonable competition with people choosing between alternatives on multiple axes. This is what keeps, for example, the zipper market functioning.
That's taking things a bit too far. I'm not aware of any widespread legal or economic definition of "competition" that requires a reasonable chance for multiple firms to become the market leaders. I think that a market can be healthy and competitive even if there is one firm with a solid, say, 75% of the market and no imminent threat to its position as market leader.
In an ideal world, though, what do we do with things that are not markets? In lots of cases, we artificially create a market by opening up some of the lower-level infrastructure. In the case of ISPs in the UK, we forced BT to split off the part of their business that owns and sells access to much of their physical infrastructure, allowing anyone to run an ISP.
In Google's case, it might be worth forcing them to open some of the data they have to competitors. Of course, given that Google isn't actually tied to any specific country, that's impossible in practice. But what else is reasonable to do with businesses that exist in markets so distorted that they no longer function as markets?
They may have pricing power.for search advertising, though.
Google can't stop you from crawling the web, but Facebook would love to.
But it doesn't mean nobody goes into politics.
I think you're spot on. What features could a better system have? One limitation of Google is that you can't group search results...perhaps a better system would cluster results by topic or demographic that views the content, so that you can focus on different perspectives on a search result.
Keep in mind that Google hasn't been a superpower for very long. All of this 'no one can ever disrupt Google' talk is nonsense.
Over the course of that year, I saw things get so bad with Y!, that you could sign up for a new email address, and before you could change your opt-out settings, it was too late, the address was sold, and you already had spam in your inbox. That's when Yahoo lost me as a user...
To this day, I have seen decisions of Google that I may not agree with... and others that make me leery in terms of depending on their products/applications. But nothing so sleazy that they've lost me as a user/customer. I know what their business model is... but afaik, they aren't directly selling my information to third parties. This is a pretty big deal.
At this point, Google is not the leading search engine due to its quality, any more than the reason Facebook is the leading social network is because someone couldn't build one just as good in a month. Google is the leading search engine because it used to be the leading search engine, and because your phone defaults to it, and because that's what you remember.
If Myspace had put a minimal amount of resources into the coding of its platform instead of pocketing the maximal amount of cash, Facebook wouldn't exist. If Altavista had kept a clean page, and maybe showed a bit more personality and interest in algorithms, Google wouldn't exist.