How worried should we be about Google’s monopoly over web traffic?

The internet has evolved over the last three decades: today, when we open our browsers, they will probably go straight to Google, either because it’s our home page or the default search engine, which means that anything we type in the address bar is processed through the search engine.

For a lot of people, if the Google logo does not appear when the browser is opened, the internet “isn’t working”. But the company doesn’t just enjoy near total dominance over how we look for things, it also pretty much controls what we find.

This is the zero-click or clickless strategy outlined in this September 2018 entry on the company’s blog: more and more of the terms we enter in the search engine generate a result within the search engine itself, at the top of the list of results, which eliminates the need to click to access another site. In the image, a small test I carried out: it didn’t matter if I looked for information about the stock market, the price of bitcoin, how my football team did, what’s on at the movies, the best seafood restaurant nearby, about how fly to Madrid, the weather or the traffic, Google’s answers take me to its own results page, prominently located, so I don’t have to go looking elsewhere.

A recent study by SparkToro showed that less than half of Google searches ended…