As of the writing of this post, Evolving Trends is still the No.1 blog for the keywords “Google Monopoly” on Google itself, now for over 3 years, unchallenged.
Google results link for “google monopoly” (and probably for any search phrase containing google and monopoly)
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=google+monopoly&aq=0&oq=google+mono&aqi=g9
This is with no search engine optimization, whatsoever.
May be the reason there is no serious challengers in this niche topic is that very few people ever think of whether Google is a monopoly or not, so it’s not a traffic generator, and, therefore, of little to no interest to the news media.
Hmm.
Update: September 7, 2009
Within just a week or so of posting this note, Google announced that they’re launching an online version of Monopoly. They’ve also added Google News results referring to that, so now the #1 result for the keywords “Google” and “monopoly” is their own news… about the game!
The Evolving Trends article “Is Google a Monopoly” is #2 in Google’s search results, under the Google News results.
Update: September 9, 2009
Today was launch day for Google’s Monopoly City Streets, the online Google Maps version of the board game Monopoly.
The launch site, http://monopolycitystreets.com has been down all day.
In the meantime, a lot of people are clicking on the Evolving Trends “Is Google A Monopoly?“ article (on this blog), which I’m hoping will get people to question whether Google is a monopoly or at least a potential monopoly. No many people normally think about such issue, despite it being a very important one.
As you can see from the charts below, the article used to get about 10 hits a day even though it has been the #1 result on Google search for the words “google” and “monopoly” for over 3 years now (see search results link above)

Traffic to this blog after the Google Monopoly (game) announcement

Search terms hit count on WordPress (from Google and other search engines)
September 18 Update
The top three results, including the Evolving Trends article at #1, are now showing above the News links.
September 19 Update
Google has completely buried this article after I expanded on the footnote to talk about Google practicing vigilante justice with site owners. The article didn’t just drop to #2 or even the 2nd or 3rd page. It has been completely buried deep in search results. This is obviously an act of censorship. And there you have it, the power of Google.
Related
