No Laws Yet In Search Of Profits

The Competition Commission has clamped down on Google’s paid-for search results

- Siddhartha Mishra

EVEN though Robert E. Kahn and Vint Cerf’s efforts had led to something we now know as the internet, it took a Tim Berners-Lee to give us the World Wide Web—a term incorrectly used synonymously with the former. However, users still needed to have access to indexed web pages or websites sorted according to specific queries. The first search engine, Archie, was around, and first-generation web users will remember the likes of Alta­Vista, Lycos, Yahoo and Dogpile more vividly. But the collective imagination was blown when Sergey Brin and ­Larry Page came up with Google.

Since the end of 1998, Google has been at the forefront of innovation and popularity in the universe of the general web search engine. The likes of Google are horizontal search engines, trawling and indexing entries according to relevance to provide results. However, the web user’s need for specifics also led to the rise of vertical search engines such as Amazon and our desi Flipkart in e-commerce—a place where a user can now find every product imaginable.

When it comes to the general horizontal web search, Google just needs a crown to call itself king. According to StatCounter, Google had 93.82 percent marketshare in India in December 2016, while Bing from Microsoft had a 4.7 percent stake. Statista says Google cornered 94.55 percent of the pie in October 2017.