Everyone Loves Google, Until It’s Too Big

But consider this: As recently as July 2005, Google was ahead of Yahoo in market share by just six percentage points, at 36.5 percent to 30.5 percent, according to comScore, the market research company. Today, however, that advantage is much wider, at 63 percent to 21 percent.

At Google, Hal Varian, its chief economist, and Mr. Wagner said that the public was not blindly loyal to any one search engine. They cited a recent survey by Forrester Research in which 55 percent of the adults polled used more than one search engine every week.

“You buy a car, use it for four years, and then you’ll look around at your choices,” Mr. Varian said. “But for search, we’re competing on a click-by-click basis.” If more users are going to Google, he said, it’s because they are concluding that Google’s product is superior.

What Yahoo and Microsoft haven’t been able to attain, however, is parity with the Google brand, which had become a formally recognized verb by 2002. Mr. Raghavan said he recognizes that Google is “synonymous with search.”

我谈过网络的自然垄断性。因为现在 的网络经济模式是网民不用直接付钱，所以市场不起作用，人们不会理性的去在不同产品间比较。这就引起了网络的自然垄断性，人们只记住了先头者，如Google之余搜索，QQ之于即时通讯，sina之于门户，YouTube之于视频，flickr之于图片分享。