Searching for Trouble

Google search now takes in about four of every ten online advertising dollars, and last year, Google's revenues exceeded twenty-two billion dollars, more than two-thirds of the thirty billion in total U.S. newspaper advertising projected for this year. Google has reinforced the notion that traditional media now want to combat: that digital information and content should be free and that advertising alone should subsidize it. To many, Google appears impregnable. But the same has been thought of the Big Three auto companies, IBM, and Microsoft.