21 Jan, 2026
This blog post is a follow-up to Dawn of a new era in Search, published last year. A lot has changed: the legal case has advanced, AI has become the central battleground, and the need for open index access has only grown sharper.
As of late 2025, one company decides what nearly 9 out of 10 people see when they search the web: Google. On August 5, 2024, a U.S. court officially ruled that Google is a monopolist in general search services. This ruling is not about ads or browser defaults alone. It is about who controls the index that powers both search and AI - and whether anyone else is allowed to build on it.
The stakes have grown sharper over the past year. LLMs hallucinate without grounding in real-world information; every agent that answers questions about the real world, depends on search. LLMs themselves are a blend of proprietary and open source. Cloud compute is competitive. But search is different - only one company controls a comprehensive, fresh, high-quality web index. If one company controls the index, it controls the floor on how good AI can be - and who gets to build it. The innovation crunch in search is now an innovation crunch in AI.
We are writing this from a position we believe in: people should have the choice to access information without behaviour-changing, ad-driven, intermediary standing between them and knowledge.
Why does this matter? The information we consume shapes our understanding of the world as profoundly as the food we eat shapes our bodies. Search (directly, and indirectly through AI) is the primary mechanism through which we inform political judgments, financial decisions, medical choices, and countless other consequential aspects of our lives. When a single company controls the gateway to information - and operates that gateway in ways misaligned with user interests - it influences not only what we know, but how we reason.
The problem: A search monopoly
The data is stark.
Worldwide search market share (October 2025, StatCounter):
Search Engine Market Share Google 90.06% Bing 4.31% Yandex 1.84% Yahoo 1.45% DuckDuckGo 0.89% Baidu 0.73%
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