The European Search Perspective project faces serious obstacles, but the U.S. government’s proposed search-antitrust settlement with Google could lend it a hand.
Google’s dominance of web search—consistently above 85% of the market in the U.S.—is an unmissable fact of online life. But a key source of that power is much less obvious: the exhaustive index of web pages that Google has created and maintains, and which is so comprehensive that even alternative search engines often have to rent it out.
