It was a well-intentioned and fashionably anti-corporate response, marred only by one flaw. Google, the online world’s dominant information provider, is now so powerful as to constitute a potential monopoly. If Yahoo! and Microsoft fail to squeeze Google’s market share in the search engine wars now being fought, every internet user will be the poorer.

This is not to diminish Google’s remarkable achievements. In little more than five years, it has proved the easiest way to search 4,285,199,774 web pages, 880 million images and more than 845 million news-group messages. You can use it as a translation service, a calculator, a dictionary or a product catalogue. From automated telephone voice searches to an electronic news-stand, Google has come close to being the only digital research tool that many of us use.

Therein lies the problem. Any company that controls around 80 per cent of web search requests is starting to wield an unhealthy influence on our access to information. If your opinions fall foul of Google, who can stop it from dropping links to your web page? Already the Church of Scientology has used legal threats to have anti-Scientology pages removed from the search index, albeit temporarily. And when Google was negotiating with China to have access restored to the country’s web-surfers, there were rumours of compromises, never confirmed, that had blocked sites that might embarrass Beijing.

There are growing rumblings of discontent about Google’s use of its unspecified “editorial guidelines”. It recently banned the text advertisements bought by an environmental group on the ground that its pages criticised the sewage-treatment policies of a major cruise line. Dame Anita Roddick has found her outspokenness a problem for Google, which removed one of her advertisements. The site, apparently, was unhappy that her personal weblog had called John Malkovich a “ vomitous worm”. Should a supposedly neutral information source be making such editorial judgments?

Its dominance in selling text advertisements, the paid-for listings that accompany search results also raises concerns. Although the company does not disclose how much it earns from the listings, the market is estimated to be worth a couple of billion dollars, and growing at a vast rate. If you want your message to be seen widely, you have little alternative but to buy up Google “keywords”. Even the BBC bought up search terms relating to the Hutton report last month to ensure that surfers could find its side of the story.

Companies such as DaimlerChrysler boosted their online ad spend by around a third last year because so many of us now use the web when deciding to buy cars. As we spend more on online purchases, Google’s influence is set to grow. Even today the company can make or break a business according to the way it lists the company’s website. When it altered the way its algorithms prioritised websites last autumn, there were howls of protest from companies, formerly rated within the top search results, that suddenly found their revenue collapsing. Let’s hope for their sakes that Yahoo!, MSN and others grow to offer these companies a second chance.

All this should not, of course, prevent the ordinary web surfer from using Google in preference to some of its increasingly effective rivals, such as Teoma.com and Vivisimo.com. But if you do, you might like to know that Google stores for years a detailed note of everything you search for, and at what time of day, which it logs according to your computer’s address. It may, it says, “release specific personal information about you” to the powers that be. You’re not feeling quite so lucky now, are you?

The author is The Times’s technology columnist

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