Google—Competition is just one click and 27 billion US dollars away

When you think about search, you think about finding useful results. As

Ed Zitron has documented

, when today's executives think about search, they think about making money from search. Whether you find what you're looking for has become incidental at best.

While Google has helped many smaller publishers increase their distribution, its domination of the advertising market has also put them at risk of extinction.

The best examples from the last two decades are Google and Facebooks’s multi-sided network effects. People prefer searching and connecting with each other on these properties, so advertisers and content creators keep using them. It creates a virtuous cycle, and makes the self-interested move on every player’s part one that reinforces these companie... See more