Several years ago, the very first Wendy’s location was forced to close down. Why? Because for years it had been situated near a popular tourist attraction (museum?) which drove traffic to the Wendy’s. The other business moved, and the Wendy’s lost a lot of business. You could say that the move devastated their business … but the benefit to Wendy’s had always been an indirect (secondary) effect for the other business.

What would the government do to cause more competition in the search engine market? It’s not cost prohibitive to enter the market. For a few bucks a month, anyone with the necessary coding skills can launch a search engine – it just takes a domain name and a hosting plan (yeah, you need to spend more money to scale the site if you get popular, but that’s different than merely entering the market). Sure, the marketing will take some work, but setting up the distribution chain is very cheap.

Don’t think Google search could be toppled? Go back 10 years in the time machine and look at who the dominant players in the market were. Remember when Yahoo was the absolutely best investment in the history of the world?

Then there’s the whole issue of search engine rankings being a zero sum game. Let’s say you and I have the two most popular pages on a particular topic. You’re #1 this month and I’m #2. Google changes its algorithm and you drop to 2 and I ascend to 1. OK, you got “screwed” by Google, but I got a benefit. Who is to say which site is better – it’s very subjective.

I do think that Google makes an effort to aid site owners. While they don’t tell anyone exactly how their system works (because that would be a recipe for disaster, and spam site owners would quickly abuse the system), they do say what constitutes good and bad practices and make it easy to get your site indexed with them.