A monopoly is acknowledged by the UK government when a company reaches 25% market share. Google completely obliterates this figure, accounting for 65.1% of all internet searches in the USA. This is more than triple the share of rival Yahoo, and more than nine times that of Microsoft.

Google was originally founded on September 4, 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin whilst they were studying at Stanford University. The main objective was "to organise the worlds information and make it universally accessible to all."

Since then Google has rapidly grown in size and popularity. The company now has 19,786 employees, processes over 1 petabye of data on their servers every hour, and is the most visited website in the world. In fact Google has had such a profound impact on society it has now become a verb.

However, Google has come under fire during recent years. In 2007 they were criticised for placing a cookie on users computers that tracked search history and didn't expire until 2038; this was later changed and now lasts for 2 years. Privacy International is concerned about how the data of millions of internet users is easily accessible by governments if requested. This was demonstrated recently when academic researches uncovered someone's identity just by her internet searches.

"Cyberspace can be seen as the new bomb, a pacific blaze that will project the imprint of our disembodied selves on the walls of eternity."
Nicole Stenger

Essentially the more you use Google, the more accurate its databases become. You are feeding the monster information, often in an extensive and regular manner. Other search engines fight to better Google's ideas, with most either trailing or failing. Google looks certain to continue growing for many years to come, and is undoubtedly the search engine monopoly.