Everyone Loves Google, Until It's Too Big
THE popularity of Google's search engine in the United States just grows and grows. In the past three years, its market share gains have even been accelerating, making some people wonder whether the company will eventually obliterate what remains of its competition in search.
Context & Ripple Effects
Questions about Google's market power were already established in earlier coverage asking whether Google had become too powerful and in reporting on its combative posture toward legal challenges. The company has also continued refining its core search product, while its U.S. share gains have accelerated over three years.
Google's scale is central to the concern: it says it has indexed one trillion web addresses, yet acknowledges that indexed pages cover only part of the Web. Rising share therefore concentrates more user queries and more of the practical gateway to online information in one service.
First-order effects
- Google gains a larger share of U.S. search use, while the remaining search competitors are left with a smaller portion of the market.
- Google must support a growing volume of queries on infrastructure it says can draw on the processing power of 1,000 machines for a single search.
Second-order effects
- Search competitors face a steeper scale disadvantage: matching Google's index breadth and continuing product refinements requires investment even as Google captures more user attention.
- Google's growing position makes the earlier debate over its power more consequential, because search quality and index scale become increasingly concentrated in one company.
Third-order effects
- If the share trajectory persists, search risks becoming a market where scale in indexing and computing reinforces leadership, making meaningful competition harder to sustain.
- Greater concentration of the Web's primary discovery layer is likely to keep Google's market power under scrutiny alongside the technical performance of its search engine.
The trend: Web search is trending toward scale-driven concentration, with index breadth and computing capacity reinforcing the leading engine's position.