Surprise! Google was a monopoly (don’t say I didn’t tell you so)
The illustration that accompanies this article is from July 2013, when my articles were being published only in Spanish, and I used it both to illustrate my piece for that day in which I expressed concerns about where Google was going, and I incorporated it in the slide deck I use when I discuss the Google case in my innovation courses. All my students from the last seven years are familiar with this slide.
Some people only just seem to have just realized that Google was a cause for concern seven years ago. In fact, in 2013 was the time when many of us were already unhappy about the company abandoning the original Google results page with its ten links, as well as the increasing preponderance and visibility of advertising and Google products on its results pages. In 2013, a Google search results page was using on average a meager 23% of its surface in displaying the real search results coming from the algorithm, the so-called organic results: all the rest were either sponsored results, or Google products.
Google, once a company whose mission was, in the words of one of its founders, “to get you out of Google and into the place you’re looking for as quickly as possible”, was becoming an emporium that no longer tried to take you to the place you were looking for, but rather to keep you under its umbrella as…
