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OAKLAND, Calif. — In 2000, just two years after it was founded, Google reached a milestone that would lay the foundation for its dominance over the next 20 years: It became the world’s largest search engine, with an index of more than 1 billion web pages.
The rest of the internet never caught up, and Google’s index just kept on getting bigger. Today, it is somewhere between 500 billion and 600 billion web pages, according to estimates.
Now, as regulators around the world examine ways to curb Google’s power, including a search monopoly case expected from state attorneys general as early as this week and the antitrust lawsuit the Justice Department filed in October, they are wrestling with a company whose sheer size has allowed it to squash competitors. And those competitors are pointing investigators toward that enormous index, the gravitational center of the company.