Google CEO Sundar Pichai defended Google from allegations of dominance of the search engine market by connecting its success to the popularity of the Chrome web browser.

Pichai appeared as a witness during Google's presentation of its defense to the judge in the D.C. District Court on Monday as part of one of the most significant technology antitrust trials in a generation. The CEO defended Google from the Department of Justice's claims that Google maintains an illegal monopoly through its control of the search engine market and its agreements with mobile phone makers and web browsers to make Google the default search engine. Pichai claimed that Google's search engine prominence arose due to it investing in Chrome in the early years after its 2008 release.

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“We realized early on that browsers are critical to how people are able to navigate and use the web,” Pichai said, according to the Wall Street Journal.

“It became very clear early on that if you make the user’s experience better, they would use the web more, they would enjoy using the web more, and they would search more in Google as well,” Pichai said.

Pichai's appearance comes in the eighth week of the trial, after testimony from other executives of Google as well as executives of Apple and Microsoft.

The core of the DOJ's case has focused on whether or not Google's decadeslong partnership with Apple allowed the search engine to hold a monopoly over search, District Court Judge Amit Mehta said. If Google's deal had blocked Apple from developing its own search engine, then that would make the arrangement anti-competitive and potentially a violation of antitrust law.

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The notion that search engine users have any meaningful ability to choose their search engine is "bogus," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified during the trial.

The trial is expected to wrap up sometime in November.