search is not close to being a natural monopoly. you are vastly underestimating how strong google’s execution has been. perhaps because you need to convince yourself that you could compete, “if only” ...
One doesn't exclude the other. I admire a lot of what Google has done and agree on a very strong execution. This still doesn't change the fact, that a search engine (1) gets better with every query-click pair and hence favors the market leader, (2) is a highly profitable business, which allows to buy distribution (this is the biggest market entry barrier), and (3) there are many small points that add up (crawler access is one minor but annoying issue: Web-Sites very often see all crawlers except Google and Bing as "bad scrapers"; so small companies need to invest a lot of time to convince them to get access and many will still never allow it what users then rate as bad quality) ... but, yes, Google is doing a lot of things right, they have very good people. Many of them my friends or ex-colleagues. This still doesn't change the fact of the original article: A 93% market share is not great.
