I don't think search really has a high barrier to entry. Certainly not compared to things I usually associate the term with like, say, airplane manufacture or deep sea oil extraction. Duck Duck Go only had three employees when they passed a million visitors, so I can't imagine they required huge amounts of capital.
> I don't think search really has a high barrier to entry.
Others disagree, including Google Chief Economist Hal Varian, who said (in 2008)[1]:
“Scale is pretty critical [because] search technology exhibits increasing returns to scale.”
Or Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President of Product Management and Marketing:
“So more users more information, more information more users, more advertisers more users, more users more advertisers, it’s a beautiful thing."
Or Eric Schmidt: “Scale is key. We just have so much scale in terms of the data we can bring to bear.” “We are a company that operates at scale . . . trust me it is a scale company.” “We think search is about comprehensiveness, freshness, scale and size for what we do. It’s difficult for [Microsoft] to copy that.”
It seems obvious to me that internet search has both economies of scale and network effects, both classic barriers to entry.
Others that might seem to be in market are niche players.
Scale is good for consumers, benefit of scale is a thing, so 'trust busting' should happen if there are fewer than three.
In the us search market, we have google, ddg, and Bing.
Wanting more choice is very American, but it's hard to take seriously.