This is bullshit. Yahoo! and Altavista were there before Google. And by calling Google's page rank based search algorithm "just a little better than others" the author reveals his own ignorance.
>Back in the mid-'90s when Sergey Brin and Larry Page started the company, there were many other search tools jostling for position.
... which puts a lie to the sentence you quoted.
And then the next point:
>Second, what makes Google's search dominance profitable is network effects. Without a large internet to index, and a huge number of people looking for things online, even the best imaginable search would be worthless.
That's not what people mean when they talk about network effects. The fact that huge numbers of people use Google doesn't make searching with Google more useful, and Microsoft can also index that "large internet" for Bing.