Google is getting huge, buying up tons of resources. is this good for us in the long run? competition breeds better results for users in my opinion.
They are the King in the search engine arena, their Gmail proved to be far better than the existing ones and are getting inroads into email market share. They are now competing to get into the social marketing segment. Not a monopoly yet but one with monopolistic powers.
Like it was pointed out above, the internet is such a big place. Wasn't there an article or something that said all these big sites we hear about everyday (google, yahoo, myspace) are actually only 40% of the internet or something. They said that atleast 60% were small to medium sized websites. A monoply has to be 60%, so no, I don't think so. The bigger issue is the actual monopoly that verisign has on .com domain names.
Google may become a monopoly, but not any time soon. After all, there is still Yahoo (and other search engines) there right? Besides, search engines control only a fraction of all sites. However, as Google has major influence on the Internet, I guess Google is becoming more and more like a monopoly.
Personally I think Google is LOSING it monopoly. For example one or possibly two years ago Google was gaining massive strength. It was getting bigger and bigger, better and better. But at the moment it seems to have stopped growing. They are of course buying up small companies with cool products. But they don't seem to be growing very quickly. At the moment Adsense (for me anyway) doesn't seem the best. They seem to be losing there grip. Google at the moment is still big and will continue to dominate the search engine ranks for a long time. But they are, very slowly, losing there grip. Just my idea.
The thread title should be in the Present Perfect Tense because Google has already achieved monopoly.
I don't know anything about Baidu, or whatever it's called, but that Chinese search engine could possibly give Google a challenge. If China offers enough of a protection for it then I could see Baidu being something. Other than that, Microsoft still could be competitive, if they get their act together and be more creative and decisive, instead of acting like the big behemoth that they are now.