When it comes to search, Google is a monopoly. That's the ruling from a US federal judge who called Google a "monopolist." It's not an opinion shared by all, but the weight of this decision could come crashing down on Google and its position as the world's most widely-used search engine.
I've long argued that Google achieved this dominant search engine position by being not just a good Internet wayfinder, but by being the best. GenZ may not remember a time before you "Googled" something, but some of us were there at the dawn of the World Wide Web, a network that grew so fast and wide that it quickly became unknowable. Web Search was a critical and, for a time, a varied industry. Google wasn't even there at the start. Yahoo, Lycos, Alta Vista, and Northern Light (really felt like a canny lighthouse reference) all predated Google, which arrived in 1999.
