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Comment by barista | Hacker News Reader

This is a huge win for Google. For a company that has near monopoly in search and online ad business to escape this is a big deal.

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What is Google's market share? I thought it was under 70%.

It's not like they've actually had a monopoly (90%) for almost 2 decades. Furthermore, it's not like you can't trivially change your search engine in the next 2 minutes.

There are multiple ways of measuring market share. One way is by the number of searches, and by that measure, in the US, google's market share is under 70%. Outside of the US, google's share is over 90% in many countries.

Another way to measure market share is by counting incoming clicks to websites from search engines. By that measure, google's share is higher.

Yes, and in one really big country, it's under 5%.

http://thenextweb.com/asia/2012/11/06/google-search-maps-con...

I bet Microsoft has a much more consistent desktop market share in more countries. That is, about 90% everywhere. And that's one monopoly that isn't going away any time soon.

Regardless of marketshare, low switching costs encourages competition.

What we don't want is high marketshare and high switching costs which reduce the incentive of a company to continue to innovate.

If the share of incoming clicks to websites is higher than the share of searches, doesn't that imply that it's a more useful product, as a greater fraction of people seemingly find what they're looking for than on competitors?

In his defense, he did say "near" :)

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