Capital barrier

In economics the main factor in limiting competition and creating monopolies is a  capital barrier.  That means the cost of starting the business is very high, such is traditionally the case in mining, steel production and auto manufacturing. 

The reality is that capital is so abundant in the world that such problems never happen in established industries.  On the otherhand it may be a real problem in new industries.

I recently learned that the cost of running a search engine for the first time on the Internet costs over $100 million.

That whole issue was confirmed by Yahoo and then muted by Yahoo.  In this statement Yahoo says it takes hundreds of millions to run the first search. 

Yahoo has now made its basic total Internet alpha-sort, the costly capital barrier, available to developers for free.  The reason for this is that Microsoft bought Powerset, a San Francisco company that has the best search engine around, using Natural Language...meaning you can ask a question like 'where can I convert my car to natural gas?' and get an intelligent, pertinent answer.

Powerset is still in beta and was only able to buy the alpha-sort on Wikipedia in English. Try it.

Just as I write this, a new search engine itself has lowered the capital bar with a search bot that runs on fewer machines, covers more sites and looks great: cuill.co