Good questions, and there are some reasonable guesses at the answers, I paraphrased your first one as:

> How did Google get a search engine monopoly?

Technology, Timing, and Momentum.

Google exploited the social signal of linking to organize the list of web pages by those considered most valuable by the people linking to them. That relatively simple fact made their search results much better than the others. And of course they patented it (PageRank).

They arrived at a time when advertisers were just learning that they would have to advertise on "the net", and they offered advertisers something that other channels could not provide, feedback on views.

As the 'biggest' web site (by pageviews) they get the majority of the advertising dollars from advertisers, and they combined that with only showing ads about '<X>' when people were searching for '<X>' (fill in your product)

The environmental piece of the puzzle was that the number of advertising dollars is finite. A lot of people don't understand that. If you create a web site for someone to advertise on, new "inventory" as they call it, to get someone to pay to advertise on it you have to pull those ads from someone else's web site.[1] And because of that Google's success sucked a lot of oxygen out of the online advertising ecosystem. My first start up after Sun was a web magazine and the 'best' banner ads came from Yahoo who could pay you top dollar to show them and Alta Vista was the best search engine. When Google launched search advertising the value of a Yahoo! banner revenue went down by 95%. Like a Redwood dropping sap on the ground to kill off seedlings underneath it, Google's success was making it hard to succeed without it's ad juice.

Now everyone can do PageRank type search, and in blind tests Bind and Google results are indistinguishable. But momentum keeps Google on top. Interestingly, Facebook could take 10 or 20 billon out of Google's market cap by doing search in addition to social, but for what ever reason they have, they don't.

Your second question is thus:

> Why don't the browsers have all the power?

And the answer is they do, and of late "Apps". Once Bing search results achieved parity with Google, people stopped switching "back" to Google from their non Google searches. Microsoft market share has grown on the back of IE doing Bing search by default when you type in the address bar. And now Mozilla has chosen to show Bing results (via Yahoo) as the default. It will be interesting to see how many people switch it back to Google. If you look at Google's quarterly results you will see they break out a number that is called "paid distribution." That is code for money Google pays for others to send search to their engine so they can advertise on it. Its gone from a miniscule amount in 2005 to nearly a billion dollars a quarter this year. Paying others like Apple to send searches on your iDevice to Google. I generally interpret that as a sign the monopoly is eroding.

The headline though, that Eric doesn't understand how Google works is incorrect. He knows exactly how Google works. But the book he wrote isn't about that, rather it is a "narrative" which describes things in a way that imputes knowledge and wisdom and greatness. The point is to make him and Jonathan look good in the eyes of the public and to tell a good story. I think it succeeds on both counts. How many people would buy a book about how luck and timing made people billionaires and in nearly 20 years of trying they still haven't come close to duplicating it? Imagine the autobiography of someone who won the lottery, pretty ordinary life, some personal triumphs, sudden massive wealth, a lot of sudden "friends" by people who would seek to influence that sudden wealth. Guess what, if you have a private jet and offer to fly friends to Cannes to catch the film festival, you will get your choice of people who will fly there with you :-)

[1] Yes, there is a infinite supply of 'remainder' ads, where people will pay 1 - 3 cents for an ad like stock brokers who put in open limit buy orders for .01 to catch to flash crash bounces. Those ads won't even cover the electricity cost of the page to host them.