Just so everyone's clear, monopoly doesn't mean (nearly) 100% market share; it means a large enough market share to be able to manipulate the market.
So, to elaborate on your first point, I think you're saying that the ease of switching search engines means that a market share necessary to manipulate the search market would be near 100%, much higher than Google has. Am I reading you correctly?
Since search engines are all free to use, many of the criteria of a monopoly seem hard to apply, but the classic defintions I'm familiar with include things such as "no reasonable substitute" which is not the case for Google Search.
https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
Google is dominate for sure.
I agree there are options, but they are Bing and Yandex. The others are just mashups.
Google isn't a monopoly for users, it's a monopoly for developers. You can't get users without being on Google.
Only if I can replace one company with another, at roughly equal results, can the market be considered competitive.
I can't delist my site on Google and replace those users with Bing users.
If each search engine had only 5% or 10% of the market, though, I could. And I might. That's what a competitive market looks like.
Google is, from that perspective, a monopoly.
And while Google has monopsonic power, it isn't the sole player in the market so it's not a true monopsony. Facebook, Twitter, and other channels have control as well. If you still disagree, look at how widespread Facebook's open graph standards are as proof of the market catering to these companies' purchasing power.
Or just look at the header on the article: https://i.imgur.com/XlGgTaw.png
Not really.
And yet, thanks to their broken spam filters, you may have to.
Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo... they're all viable products that you can use to accomplish 90ish% of what Google could find, and maybe even more now that Google strips historical data (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16153840, from a month ago).
Since you're mentioning SEO, I just checked and 15.8% of searches for my website came from non-Google search engines in the last month (in my case, Yandex and DDG are the most popular ones). Bing is also taking a huge chunk of the traffic thanks to Windows 10 using it in the start menu, whether you like it or not. And while one example isn't viable enough to make general statements, it's clear that alternatives do exist and are used extensively.
It's a product that's superior when compared to its competitors. It's not a monopoly though.