Jamie Court on huffingtonpost.com at 06/02/2010 wrote:Microsoft caught hell from anti-trust regulators for bundling its browser and software during the 1990s. A new report being distributed to US and European antitrust regulators today shows how Google has been using its greater than 70% share of the online search market to muscle its way into domination of other Internet businesses.
The Inside Google study found that since adopting “Universal Search” in 2007, which favors Google’s properties with prominent listings in its results, traffic to Google’s sites has soared at the expense of competitors. In a nut shell, Google search results give preference to Google products and services, like Googlemaps, YouTube, and Google product search, where advertisers pay to find you and make Google rich.
Google claims that its search is neutral, but the study shows that it’s NOT.
comments on above article hereScott Gilbertson at theregister.co.uk on 25 Jul 2017 wrote:Just in case you didn't believe Firefox was on a trajectory that should have it crash and burn into extinction in the next couple of years, former chief technology officer Andreas Gal has usage stats that confirm it. To use Gal's words: "Firefox market share is falling off a cliff." The same could be said of Firefox itself.
What's most interesting about this data and Gal's interpretation of it is that at the same time that Firefox is sliding into irrelevancy it's becoming a better browser. It's faster than it's ever been and uses less memory – less than its replacement, Chrome. Of course, as the ancient Betamax vs VHS format wars demonstrated, having a superior product does not translate to market share.
The big question is why? Why is Firefox, despite being faster than ever and using less memory than Chrome, losing ground?
Gal believes a big part of the problem is Google's monopoly on search and its aggressive marketing of Chrome. Log in to Google Mail, Google Calendar or YouTube, and Google will push Chrome through overlays, bars at the top of the screen and other means. The language of these ads implies that whichever browser you're using, if it isn't Chrome, it's slow and insecure.
As Gal puts it: "It's hard to compete in a mature market if your main competitor has access to billions of dollars worth of free marketing." Indeed, it's impossible.
"Firefox's decline is not an engineering problem," writes Gal. "It's a market disruption (Desktop to Mobile shift) and monopoly problem. There are no engineering solutions to these market problems."
Christopher Ratcliff at SEO on 25 Feb 16 wrote:As the paid search space increases in ‘top-heaviness’, as organic results get pushed further off the first SERP, as the Knowledge Graph scrapes more and more publisher content and continues to make it pointless to click through to a website, and as our longstanding feelings of unfairness over Google’s monopoly and tax balance become more acute, now more than ever we feel there should be another, viable search engine alternative.
There was a point not that long ago when you could easily divide people between those that used Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves and AltaVista. Now it’s got to the point where if you’re not using Google, you’re not really using the internet properly.
Right now though maybe we should be paying more attention to the alternatives. Maybe our daily lives and, for some of us, careers shouldn’t need to balance on the fickle algorithm changes of the world’s most valuable company.
Let’s see what else is out there in the non-Google world. It’s not that scary, I promise. Although you may want to bring a coat.
Please note: this is an update of an article published on SEW in May 2014, we felt like it needed sprucing up especially many of the listed engines (Blekko, Topsy) are no longer with us.