¶ … industries: web search engines, videogame players, portable music devices, bicycles, energy drinks, cell phones. Identify major firms industry, extent, determine market share firm. Explain firms compete. This paper discusses the web search engines market, and will aim to analyze the main players in this industry, how they compete and what their market share is. The paper will also briefly look into the history of web search engines and will investigate some of the public policies that affect the firms that operate in this industry.

The web search engines appeared in the early 1990s, as the Internet began to grow and more and more pages, on different topics, became available for the users. Up to 1993, however, there was no web search engine in existence, most of the information on the Internet was stocked in catalogues, but there was no electronic indexing of these catalogues and these could only be consulted manually. In 1993, the first web search engines appeared, such as W3Catalog, which is still active today.

A big revolution came the following year, with the apparition of text-based search engines, primarily Webcrawler. The great advantage of the Webcrawler was that it indexed...

The search engines started to become more and more commercial, with the creation of businesses such as Lycos, Yahoo! Or Altavista. Google started in 1998 and by 2000, it was already gaining on the other search engines, including through innovations such as the Page Rank, as well as a better search algorithm based on this.
Google has not relinquished its strong dominance on the market since 2000. By August 2013, with some small ups and downs that will be presented further below, Google had 67% of the market. Yahoo has 11.3% of the market, while Bing, the search engine that Microsoft has created as a competitor to Google, has 17.9%. These three large search engines dominate the market, having over 96% of the total search engine market. Other smaller competitors include Ask (with 2.7%) and AOL (with 1.2%)

Google's market share has, however, decreased over the last years. Its market share in December 2010 was 84.65%, while in May 2011, it was 82.80%

. The market share for Yahoo! At this time was just about 6%, while Bing only had about 4%. Over 2013, the market share…