  E-Commerce challenges traditional approaches to assessing monopolistic
practices due to the rapid rate of growth, rapid change in technology,
difficulty in assessing market share for information products like web sites,
and high degree of interconnectivity and alliance formation among corporations.
This paper has provided a fundamental framework that integrates a network and
economic perspective to the search engine market.
  The findings indicate that (1) despite an increasing number of search
engines, barriers to entry seem high, largely due to the exponential growth in
the number of web sites and the non-scalability of the current search
technology and collective switching costs; (2) older search engine sites tend
typically to have more features to lock in users. Using standard economic
indicators (CR4=58% and HHI=1163), the industry looks close to being plagued by
anticompetitive practices. But based on a network adjusted HHI constructed in
this paper, its value, 870, suggests that there is less cause for concern.
  Based on all indicators, it suggests that Yahoo would be a contender. Other
possible contenders are MSN and Netscape. On the basis of results to date, some
search engines keep increasing their audience reach while others don't. The
trend shows that some search engines may dominate the search engine market. We
suggest conducting research in the coverage performance of search engines and
investigate "information search cost" as a performance indicator of search
techniques. In addition, we suggest paying attention to any anticompetitive
conduct (e.g. product bundling) that may lesson competition and reduce consumer
welfare. The combination of network theory and economic theory to study the
search engine market is a particularly powerful approach for E-Commerce.
