* Ownership structure - Google's founders had the front to IPO with a structure that gave them complete control of the company (10:1 voting rights over ordinary shareholders). That alone is why they can make huge long-term bets, from GMail to Android to robotics, instead of dumping inventory on the last day of each quarter to appease Wall St.

* Ads - Colossal ad revenue wasn't a guaranteed point on the trajectory from Pagerank and should therefore be considered as an independent innovation. They initially monetised with the search appliance for intranets and there was a time when they were considering a charging model for companies to use Google search.

* Superior ops - Google had to scale like crazy. The early crawlers were supposedly using 25% of Stanford's bandwidth after much pleading with admins, and the scaling never ended. Other startups might have partnered with some giant hardware company or bought into various commercial Unix offerings, but Google's early team figured out how to operate and distribute giant data centres on budget.

I would argue that their monopoly isn't due to that initial insight but a) their relentless improvement of search over the years, b) their technology infrastructure that made large-scale computing much more manageable, and c) their early lead in dramatically reducing computing cost, allowing them to spend dramatically more computing power per search than their competitors.

I'd add that another important choice was ignoring the modern business dogma of revenue maximization. They kicked the hell out of the early search advertising market by limiting things to well-chosen little text ads, something that was initially lower revenue but delivered much higher value to the users.

Yep. I worked for a newspaper when AltaVista was the best thing going and I'd help the librarians and research team craft queries to get information based on understanding the finer points of AltaVista. When the Google beta was available I showed it to them and was never called on again. It was like magic compared to what went before.

But point is that Google has ante'd up to maintain search as something that works easily, that finds what you want, etc., even while against countervailing factors.

And bringing it back to the parent, the monopoly Google maintains is a dynamic process - they aren't always fighting against other search engines. Sometimes they are doing that and sometimes they are fighting against SEO and spam, sometimes they are competing with walled gardens and whatever forces would turn the Internet into an appliance, sometimes they are fighting to make search more compelling. But they don't fit the profile of a company just sitting on a monopoly even if they maintain is what mostly brings them revenue.

Showing results for I know many who disagree. To search for what you typed in and wanted to search for, jump through {this hoop}.

Now Google has that problem for itself. About a third of Google's revenue is from AdSense (non-search ads). It's not in Google's interest for their anti-spam efforts to be too tough on made-for-Adsense sites. They crack down only on the outrageous cases. This became very clear in the "Sportsdrugs.com" case, where Google was caught in an FBI drug sting and paid $500,000,000 to avoid prosecution.

If you want to understand how Google really works, read the black hat SEO forums. Every time Google tries something new in search ranking, it's reverse engineered in a few weeks. Trying to detect SEO with machine learning based on page contents worked for a while, but now the SEO guys use machine learning too. "Automated SEO" tries to automatically reverse-engineer Google's anti-spam algorithms, then adjusts pages and links until the SEO's model of Google says the page is under the threshold where Google will consider it spam.

It's not that hard to detect web spammers, if you're willing to do a quick background check on the company behind each web site. This can be automated; see our "sitetruth.com". Large numbers of spam domains trace back to the same source, so dealing with the problem on a per-business basis rather than a per-domain basis works.

Google has a monopoly on mind share, but only about 2/3 of US search. Bing (including Yahoo, which resells Bing) has about half the search volume Google does. That's historically about where Chrysler has been relative to General Motors. Yet Chrysler is taken seriously as an competitor to GM, while Bing is not taken seriously as a competitor to Google. It's not clear why. There's no network effect in search; it matters if your friends are on Facebook, but not if they're searching with Bing.

Bing has a very low public profile. It's hard to even find out who's in charge there. (Searching with Bing won't help.) Previously, it was Satya Nadella, who moved up to being CEO of Microsoft. There is no Bing CEO any more. Bing is under Microsoft's Online Services Division, headed by Qi Lu. Different parts of Bing are under four different parts of Online Services. (The Microsoft memo: http://www.geekwire.com/2014/internal-memo-microsoft-sets-le.... If that hadn't leaked, nobody would know who was in charge over there.)

I think Google's success can be attributed to the "4x factor" - that is, that in order to change consumer behavior, you need a solution that is not the same or twice as good as current technology - you need a solution that is, at minimum, 4 times better. That's what Google Search delivered (and the iPhone, Uber, et al).

So for me it is easy to understand why people don't switch to Bing or whatever - their results are maybe, at best, 1.5x as good as Google - not good enough to alter behavior.

It's also very important to remember that Google also looked different than Yahoo!, AltaVista, etc. They were large portals with huge numbers of links. It was pretty confusing. Google was very simple. There was a search bar on a clean white screen.

> Pagerank made the difference.

To search.

But they don't make money directly from search.

They were a superior technology that was doomed to go broke until AdSense and AdWords came along.

For the first few years they ran without an income model and hoped something would come along. That something was adwords, and it made all the difference. But an argument can be made that it was luck, google didn't start out with this income model, and kind of stumbled into it. A lot of people were initially opposed to the idea, but they tried it anyway, not thinking it would be a runaway succcess.

Hoping something will come along is a terrible business model. Google actively sucks at every business except floating down the Mississippi of cash. Amazing technology and technologists, terrible business.

They could double their workforce, or hire only people with comparative literature degrees, or force everyone in the company to speak Esperanto on alternating days with Klingon, or fire nearly everyone. It would be dramatic, but in terms of the bottom line it would be pretty close to irrelevant.

Google is not a technology company. They are a cash pipeline operator.

People buy Google ads because everyone uses Google for search. So Google doesn't need to sell anything. People come to them.

It's an amazing position to be in, but it's a very unusual one.

> It would be dramatic, but in terms of the bottom line it would be pretty close to irrelevant.

I'm assuming you're talking about all of the people in the driverless cars group, android, etc.

Two things at work here:

1. As a business their size you either try to take every single dollar that floats down the mississippi or you make the river bigger. I would argue that pretty much every strategy decision that Google makes is to do those two things (example - driverless cars means more people using the internet - more people using the internet means more search - more search means more adwords. aka the mississippi gets bigger)

2. Ubiquity. Starbucks sucks, but it's on every corner. Google's strategy is no different.

From http://www.girardgibbs.com/antitrust-monopoly/:

> Monopolies are illegal if they are established or maintained through improper conduct, such as exclusionary or predatory acts. This is known as anticompetitive monopolization.

Not true: http://www.girardgibbs.com/antitrust-monopoly/