But What Do We Do If Google Is Legitimately Just A Better Search Engine?
from the wrong-tool-for-the-job dept
I’ve noted my skepticism regarding the antitrust attacks on the current Google antitrust trial regarding how it pays to have its search placed as the default on Safari and other browsers/phones. Again, that does not mean I’m skeptical of all antitrust suits against Google, as some of the others (around advertising) appear to have significantly more merit on a first pass (we’ll see what the details turn up though).
But the search case just… doesn’t seem to add up. As we’ve noted, a key part of the ongoing case was just how much Google was paying for these defaults (over $26.3 billion in 2021). But that seems to actually argue against an abuse of a monopoly position argument. Because if Google were such a monopoly, then it wouldn’t need to pay as much to get those deals. There just wouldn’t be other offerings to compete.
One bit came out in the case about a week ago, and I’ve been thinking about it a bunch since then, though not entirely sure what to make of it. Apparently, Mozilla agreed to switch to Yahoo as the default search in Firefox in 2014. Yahoo promised to pay more money to Mozilla than Google did, and promised to provide a better overall experience (including fewer ads). And apparently it was a disaster for Mozilla, because users hated it.
Chief Executive Officer Mitchell Baker said Mozilla decided to switch to Yahoo’s technology in 2014 after CEO Marissa Mayer took over and promised “to make a big bet on us.”
“That bet failed,” Baker said in a videotaped interview from 2022 played Wednesday in Google’s defense during the Justice Department’s antitrust trial. “The search experience that Yahoo was providing to Firefox users deteriorated.”
Indeed, the article notes that Yahoo agreed to pay nearly $100 million more than Google, which was important revenue for Mozilla. But users just absolutely did not like it to the point that it might have legitimately contributed to Firefox’s losing users (it’s likely there were many other factors as well, but this is still notable):
“I felt strongly that Yahoo was not delivering the search experience we needed and had contracted for,” Baker said.
[….]
Firefox’s browser has a feature that lets users easily change between searching on Yahoo, Google, Microsoft’s Bing or DuckDuckGo. Even with that, Baker said, “the number of users who stayed with Firefox declined noticeably during the years when Yahoo was the default.”
Firefox’s user decline wasn’t necessarily because of the switch, Baker said, but it did coincide with search engine change.
“Our users made it clear that they look for and want and expect Google,” she said.
And that raises a real question. How does antitrust handle a situation where the company that is so dominant is in that position because is legitimately offers a better product by a wide margin.
I would love to see more real competition in the search space. Bing and DuckDuckGo continue to just not cut it. I’m intrigued by startups like Kagi (which I’ve been using, and which actually seems pretty good), but it’s not clear how antitrust helps companies like that get a wider audience.
I’m increasingly coming to the belief that we’ve spent way too many years equating antitrust with increased competition, when it’s one of the least effective mechanisms for enabling greater competition. The situation with Mozilla and Firefox seems to just put an exclamation point on that. If the DOJ wins this lawsuit, what will it actually do to help get more competition on the market? More competition that is actually good and that people want?
It would be nice if we can get past this focus on antitrust as the only tool in the toolbox to increase competition, because it just seems woefully insufficient for that purpose.
Filed Under: antitrust, competition, defaults, mitchell baker, search, users
Companies: google, mozilla, yahoo
Comments on “But What Do We Do If Google Is Legitimately Just A Better Search Engine?”
What this has me wondering…
At what point does “too big to compete” become “too big to fail” – and where the dividing line is.
Re:
You lost me here. How can a search engine ever be too big to fail? If something were to happen to the Google search engine people might mope for a bit, but then they would go on with what they were doing. It’s not like Google is holding the life savings a any of it’s users. There is nothing that Google offers that couldn’t be replaced–if we absolutely had to.
Re: Re:
Which is why Google shouldn’t be attacked like it is. It can all be replaced with something else.
I’m all for Google paying Apple a bunch of money to be the default search on that platform. So when I switch my default to DuckDuckGo, it’s like giving Google the middle finger. The small amount of money they paid Apple for me to be the default has gone to waste.
I’m trying to move more and more away from Google. They can be replaced. No one is forcing anyone to use Google. Unless a person is holding a gun to your head forcing you to use Google, I don’t see what the issue is. I’m not a fan of Google. They are an Advertizing company. They make most of their money showing you targeted ads from all the info they gather on you. When you use an Android phone, it’s nothing buy Spying. If you have an iPhone and you install Google Apps, Google is spying on you when using those apps.
Who doesn’t know all of this by now? If you have a problem with Google Search, use something else. I use DuckDuckGo which I find works as well and without all the ads everywhere. You can use BING or YaHoo. Spread the wealth in searches. Don’t just default to Google.
I’m slowy working on switching my gmail over to Proton Mail. I don’t use Google maps, I use Apple Maps and sometimes WYZE, though Google owns WYZE! I do use other MAP apps for my Motorcycle that are better suited for motorcycle use.
Again, no one at Google has a gun to your head to use them. Yahoo used to be #1 before Google. Who knows who will dethron Google Search in the future? But with all the EU laws and regulations, only a huge company can even afford to do buisness in the EU. Can afford the fine and hire all the people needed to follow all the laws. That just locks Google in even more and making it even harder for anyone else to take over and become #1 over Google. It just helps keep Google in power.
Any other advertizing company I bet wish they aquired the Blackberry clone OS before seeing the iPhone and cloning the iPhone. Then giving it away so long as Google’s apps were front and center. Saving millions from all these companies that can put out a phone and don’t have to invest much into the OS. Google is doing most of that.
Re: Re: Re: Google
Google and I are in a symbiotic relationship. I tell Google about myself (maybe not 100% factual) and get 15 GB free storage and access to their android ecosystem, in return for them suggesting ads, which is better than the ads in newsprint.
Re:
I don’t think there should be a “too big to fail.” If Google fails, so be it. The underlying question to me, is how do we get more sustainable competitors.
Re: Re:
The answer is, you don’t. You yourself, Mike, have long espoused two things:
a) Protocols, not Platforms;
and
b) If you can’t compete with free, you’re doing it wrong (or words to that effect).
From the second platitude, I need to point out that you don’t compete with free, you embrace it, and then add value to it.
If you look under the covers of most search engines, you’ll find a number of them are gathering the underlying results from Google and/or Bing, but adding value to those results. Insofar as I’m concerned, the highest value that they could possibly add, and most of them do add this, is no freakin’ advertising. Again for me, the second priority is sorting according to relevance, and by that I mean, looking at the query for intent, not for an easy word match. For example, too often I’ll search on “How to remove Norton Antivirus”, and I’ll get back two pages of “How to install Norton Antivirus”. That’s not only useless, it’s insulting.
(And beyond that, it’s also insulting (to a lesser degree) that a search returns “4,673,210” results, when the relevant answers peter out before the bottom of the first page.)
So I’m currently using the Brave Browser and its built-in search engine. Not terrific, but nowhere near as out-of-sync-with-reality as some engines. At least they admit that they use both Bing and Google (and others) for their results. The one thing that I do like is that clicking on a result opens a new tab, not just replacing the current content – that’s user friendly, in my book. (But YMMV, and all that.)
Re: Re: Re:
I tried Brave Search when they announced they’d switched to their own web indexer and database. The results were good, but after using it intermittently for a few weeks, I got frustrated that it would occasionally and arbitrarily demand I enable Javascript to see any. Google does the same thing, so I’m back to DuckDuckGo (who even run an Onion service for extra privacy).
Re: Re: Re:
Yeah. I’m impressed with Kagi so far but it requires a monthly fee.
Re: Re: Re:
For example, too often I’ll search on “How to remove Norton Antivirus”, and I’ll get back two pages of “How to install Norton Antivirus”.
https://support.norton.com/sp/en/us/home/current/solutions/v15972972 Found via One Search.
….
With what’s come out, Google is effectively buying its position and sharing its profit.
Yes, for a long time Google search was the best. It has used that position and money earned from it and other business units to block out competition. Because their deals both block competition from getting a foothold and pay off possible competitors to not even try to compete.
It has been getting worse. I’ve noticed more and more that it just ignores parts of my search terms.
Re:
Agreed. The amount of money that Google is exchanging, that 36% revenue kickback to Apple in particular, to retain its default position, is inhuman and shouldn’t be allowed.
Google is operating on the playbook of “It is not enough for me to succeed. Others must fail.” and they’re using their vast sums of cash to make it so.
Re: Re:
Their product is so shitty at this point that killing competition in the cradle is their only play.
Re: Re: Re:
“…killing competition in the cradle is their only play.”
Brave Search, DuckDuckGo, and One Search are all alive and well. You were saying?
Google is doling out 36% of its search ad revenue on Safari to Apple alongside the massive regular payouts. It’s using its vast warchest to retain its monopoly power and its mindshare as the Only Search Engine That’s Good, all while Google Search keeps getting shittier and loaded with more ads and bad results not even close to what people search for.
Moot point. It’s not.
Re:
Ah, an expert! Welcome!
We do, though, ask for posts with a little more context in them.
For instance:
What search engine(s) do you consider superior?
Contrarily, on what basis do you suggest that Google is explicitly NOT a superior engine?
What metrics would you propose?
Re: Re:
I like search engines that find what I asked for. Even Bing is better about not insisting I meant some substitution that I absolutely didn’t mean, and leaving me zero options to convince it that I meant what I said.
Re: Re: Re:
I agree. the amount of times i end up trying my search 20 different ways because it decides what i want to search for and is almost always wrong
“part # asd-365-A-004”
“Did you mean ad290-abc?” with no option to say “no” is just ridiculous.
(please note the above is a made up example)
been trying dogpile again, cause google is completely useless anymore since the first 2 pages of every search are usually nothing but ads anyway.
if yer trying to find something to buy, sure, it’s ok, but even then it’s wildly inconsistent.
Re: Re: Re:2
Ah, another search newbie. I really should pull a LMGTFY (Let Me Google That For You), but this comment section doesn’t allow it, so…
Ever heard of quote marks? If you enclose your query in quotes, most search engines, and in particular Google, will take your entry literally.
Let me suggest that you read Google’s own Help page on search syntax, but if you’re really into ABG (Anything But Google), then you can find other sources of that syntax. The beauty here is, nearly every engine ever created, even those who came before Google, use the same syntax. Not absolutely always, but close enough for government work.
Re: Re: Re:3
You shouldn’t have to put parts of your search entry or the whole damned thing in quotes for search engines to actually pick up the terms you put in. I have to do that nearly every damn time now to avoid the search engine throwing in irrelevant results that have synonym of what I typed. The quotes are a solution to a problem entirely of Google’s own making because it was more profitable for them.
Re: Re: Re:4
As to what you “should” or shouldn’t have to do, that’s on you. Google is attempting to make things easier, and some folks like it that way. Consider it like the “I’m feeling lucky” button – some like and use it, others don’t.
And for Pete’s sake, two extra keystrokes, and you’re having a hissy fit?
Re: Re: Re:4
Gotta wonder what the hell you’re searching for that’s so confusing for Google. It’s not perfect but in my experience it’s nowhere near as bad as you’re claiming.
Re: Re: Re:5
Take a look at the first 4 letter’s of this website’s name for a clue.
Re: Re: Re:3
Bullshit. Search Google for the quoted phrase “If you enclose your query in quotes, most search engines” (archived link).
The top “featured snippet”: “When you surround your search terms with quotation marks, you are telling the database that”… well, that’s vaguely similar, but hardly a literal match. It doesn’t include the quoted phrase, and the remaining featured snippets don’t either.
So, let’s move on to the actual search results, way the hell down the page. The top result points to a Google blog post, from 2022: “How we’re improving search results when you use quotes… Sometimes people know they absolutely, positively only want webpages that mention a particular word or phrase. … Fortunately, Google Search has a special operator for that: quotation marks. Put quotes around any word or phrase… and we’ll only show pages that contain those exact words or phrases.”
Wanna guess which phrase absolutely, positively, does not appear in Google’s blog post? Don’t fall for their gaslighting. It doesn’t appear on any other result I checked either.
Re: Re: Re:4
Markdown corrupted the text (still no working preview button?!): those should be straight quotation marks, not curly ones. In the above re-quote, I’ve escaped them with backslashes and am hoping for the best. The links are good, anyway.
Re: Re: Re:5
Lovely! The Markdown people are gaslighting us too (I followed Techdirt’s “markdown” link, then the “spec” link at the bottom). Not only did it still replace the straight quotes with curly ones, now wrong in the first instance, the backslashes became part of the text.
(“Backslash escapes do not work in code blocks, code spans, autolinks, or raw HTML… But they work in all other contexts”. That was a block-quote using greater-than followed by a space, per §5.1, which is to say an “other context”.)
Re: Re: Re:5
Yes there is. It’s hard to miss…
Re: Re: Re:6
The button’s been there forever. It worked before the switch to WordPress, and not once since. Apparently it may require Javascript, and despite some early promise to fix such problems, nothing’s been done.
Re: Re: Re:3
Those don’t actually consistently solve the problem anymore. Even with a “+” in front of them.
Re: Re: Re:4
Google redefined the “+” operator so as to refer to Google Plus, and I don’t think they restored its original function when Google Plus died—which is to say that, for more than a decade, “+” has done nothing useful. And despite Google and its users repeatedly suggesting quotation marks, they’ve been broken for about as long. They seem to do something—the results differ from unquoted searches—but certainly not the “exact” searching they’re advertised for, as is trivially demonstrated (by the above links, for example).
Re: Re: Re:5
Google has an advanced search with some options for how it should search and one of them happens to be an exact phrase search.
Anyone can access it by clicking the settings in the lower right corner and selecting advanced search, or use this provided link: https://www.google.com/advanced_search
Re: Re: Re:6
I really think someone at Google is fucking with us here. Putting a search query there redirects to a page where the query has been enclosed in quotation marks. And, today, quotation marks are working! Follow the “non-working” link a bit up-thread, and you’ll see: it’s working now, and this Techdirt thread has become the only result.
Good thing I included the archive.org link; otherwise I’d seem like a crazy person. You can see that it was not working yesterday. Nor was it working the last time I saw a Techdirt comment referencing this.
Maybe Google skips the gaslighting when a page actually contains the phrase? Let’s test it. I took part of what you wrote and added a randomly-selected word: “Google has an advanced search with some options for how it should search landslide”. There’s no way that’s on the web till I post this comment, right? And, what do you know, the results are bullshit again, though it does say “missing: landslide” under each.
Re: Re: Re:7
Try it in incognito mode since otherwise google will use your search-history to modify your query, when I do that I get a single hit pointing to my post.
Re: Re: Re:8
The archive.org crawler got the same results as me. It doesn’t have my cookies and I removed all IDs from the URL before giving it to them, and, anyway, I’d never search Google without some privacy mode enabled. So these are not user-specific results.
Search for a phrase you know definitely won’t exist online, and you’ll see the bullshit results too. And if you post the phrase, tomorrow we’ll all see one result pointing to your comment.
Re: Re: Re:
Have you tried quotes?
Re: Re: Re:2
why, can you not figure out by the context of what i wrote that i was replying to the person directly atop of my post?
🙂
Re: Re:
There are couple of queries that can help determine search engine’s value.
If response to any of those doesn’t give you sites with resources to do what you want, or gives you the exact opposite of what you have searched for (for #1 example, pointing to Netflix, Paramount+, Disney+, etc. instead of SuperFreeMoviesHD4k, not actual site, or showing you suicide prevention hotline for #3), then the search engine is bad.
Re: Re: Re:
If a search engine points you to a suicide prevention website in response to a query indicating that you want to kill yourself, that’s when it’s actually doing its job right.
Re: Re: Re:2 Suicide prevention
I could see a request for methods of suicide offering a list of prevention and local aid resources on top of actual sources of methods for suicide, but a search engine shouldn’t be trying to second guess whether the end-user is a danger to themselves or others.
Likewise with bomb-making, just because someone is looking up illegal methods of doing things shouldn’t lead the search engine to presume the end-user is actually intending criminal or violent activity.
And this is before we get into the details like:
a) The mental health crisis services of the United States suck. Unless you have amazing insurance or are part of a very rich family, you’re as likely to be a victim of violence and abuse from the staff while you are an inpatient than you are likely to get effective treatment or useful crisis counseling. Getting committed is a great way to ratchet up your suicidal ideation up to eleven.
or
b) The failure of the state to actually serve the public; The state’s efforts to criminalize behavior that is not wrongdoing (e.g. drag shows, immigration); and the state’s failure to criminalize behavior that is clearly wrongdoing (e.g. killing 500K Americans by overmarketing OxyContin and Percocet in bad faith). These have demonstrated that legality no longer correlates with ethical principle. The state has no moral authority to tell us what we can or cannot do, but instead only depends on force, which it dispenses routinely and arbitrarily.
Re: Re: Re:3
And this is before we get into the details like:
a) The US is not the only country in the world, so not everyone lives there.
b) Points back up to (a).
I think habits is the first factor. Windows is not the best operating system outer there, but since a lot of people is used to it, they don’t change to change to any better OS (Linux… cough). Same goes for Office. For Chrome. For Coca-cola. etc.
For the Firefox case, around 2014, it became a slug, nothing to compare to the (way more advertised) Chrome was at this time, and that pretty much what slowly killed it. Most extensions were available also for Chrome, all Google services were integrated, and it was very fast. Since IE was already dead, people has no choice to switch to another browser, and naturally, they choose the one that was advertised on Google Search homepage (beating any advertising that Firefox could ever buy).
Microsoft may not be wrong when they said that the best search engine is the most used (and not the opposite) since billions searches greatly improve the results relevant. But since there is (almost) only one search engine, there is no way to confirm it. That what is great with monopolies.
Re:
Linux is different, it’s not necessarily better. and unfortunately, all the linux bros who keep saying so when the evidence is so clear that its not does not help linux at all.
one simple case, remember when gnome?(whatever it was was the default windowing system for Ubuntu for a couple of years recently) made it so you couldn’t change the desktop without manually editing files and using hte command line, instead of simply doing a “make shortcut here” couple of clicks functionality?
basically windows remains the default for everyone for a couple of reasons.
A. microsoft has deals with most if not al of the oems to have windows preinstalled on nearly every computer.
b. windows is capable of doing 95% of any possible tasks without using the command line, which most people just don’t want to have to learn.
Linux is so fragmented in terms of distros, various apps, etc that is a nightmare for anyone who isn’t very used to the OS, and that has been true since i worked with the Linux Kernel Project back in the 90s, and it’s still true today.
Re: Re:
But unlike Windows, alternatives were and are available via the package manager for all the big distros, That is a strength of Linus, there are choices for window managers, and a lot of other software.
Re: Re: Re:
alternatives may be available, and yet, 90+ % of all windows installations are left to default settings because most people won’t bother. so they either like it or don’t.
is your car old enough/did you ever own one old enough to have steel rims and maybe hubcaps? did you ever change them out? better options have been available since the mid 70s. or did you just use what was put on there cause it worked?
(god i really hate car analogies with tech, sorry)
Re: It depends on your needs
Windows is the best OS for the average user. The average user does not want (or need to) open a command line every time they want to update a program. They expect everything to work pretty much out-of-the-box. This user doesn’t have time to figure out how to install Photoshop under Wine, or how to stop Debian from asking for a DVD every time she wants to update the software on her computer.
Re: Re:
I can tell you haven’t actually used Linux the last 10 years because you are repeating all the talking-points for someone who haven’t kept up with it.
Re: Re: Re:
Make that “the last twenty years”
Re: Re: Re:
I have Debian (Bookworm) running on two of my computers right now.
Re: Re:
Well maybe if you run arch itself, and don’t add a graphic package manager, but otherwise almost all distros come with a graphic package manager. System error recovery may need the command line, but that applies to Windows as well, as it is far easier to give instructions for using the command line than the navigation through menus, tabs and buttons.
Google's only "the best" ...
… because all the other search engines have pointlessly emulated them. Google in 2015 was WAY better than it is today. Bing just a few years ago was superior to Google in every way that wasn’t mapping-related, but changed over the years to become more Google-like. Same with DuckDuckGo.
I had high hopes for You.com because it really hit the ground running. But now it wants to be all about crappy AI that isn’t helpful, so it’s trash as well.
At this point, all the other search engines are trying so hard to be Google instead of trying to be GOOD that Google’s dominance is ensured.
Mike, I believe you’re overly focused on the Apple deal. The DOJ seems similarly preoccupied. However, forming a monopoly involves more than just paying competitors to avoid competition, as Google is allegedly doing with Apple, or engaging in revenue-sharing, which is also happening with Apple. These actions are significant red flags, but there are additional indicators of a detrimental monopoly. These include a decline in quality or innovation, substantial barriers to entry (which, in the case of search, certainly exist), adverse effects on consumers, price manipulation leading to inflated costs without corresponding improvements in value, and the use of exclusive agreements to control market access (which is what Google is doing, but I believe the DOJ is too narrowly focused on the trees in the forest and not the forest itself). Moreover, monopolies often exhibit reduced responsiveness to customer needs and complaints, reflecting a lack of competitive pressure to maintain high service standards (and this exists with pretty much every Google product in existence). There are other factors as well, but a company doesn’t necessarily create a monopoly solely by paying off or acquiring its competitors. I wish the DOJ would concentrate on these other aspects, because they do exist. Merely compensating potential competitors does not alone demonstrate monopolistic behavior or market dominance. I do agree with your last paragraph though in regards to antitrust; I know we have more tools to deal with monopolies, and we need to start using them.
Re:
Even the people who should understand monopolistic behavior, and who have charged themselves with the task of spreading information about such behavior, evidently do not (or do not want to) understand it.
I have little hope that the decades of neoliberal monopoly-building will be reversing anytime over the next 10 years, when even our ostensible allies simp for monopolies.
On the plus side...
Duck Duck Go returns the Techdirt home page when you search for it.
Today.
If what Google is serving up now is really the best we can hope for, we’re totally fucked.
Re:
What Google is serving up now isn’t even the best Google has done.
Re: Re:
Google is suffering that thing that destroys so many things in this world…
They forgot, they are supposed to be a search engine.
A majority of the stupidity thats making it crappier these days is non-search stuff they’ve done to benefit other arms of alphabet.
If they did the crazy thing & went back to just being the best search engine they can be the world would be a better place, and I wouldn’t be running searches on Yandex & muddling my way through russian because I get much better results even with the language barrier.
If Google is the best search engine, why does it have to pay vast sums to Apple? Maybe to prevent Apple from developing a better one?
And–btw–there is no such thing as a “best” search engine. It depends what customers value. Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of searches: smart and dumb. Smart searches are of the serious research variety. Smart people often do dumb searches, as when they are looking for a review of kitchen knives. Google is better for smart searches (I love Google Scholar!), but DuckDuckGo is much better for dumb searches, since it preserves user privacy and has much less cruft.
Re:
Presumably they pay Apple because if they don’t, Apple will accept a payment instead from a competitor, and Apple won’t mind that the competitor’s search engine is worse. They should (as Firefox’s experience shows), but they won’t.
Re:
Where does this idea of Apple being a competitor come from? It pops up almost universally, but I cannot for the life of me find a basis for it. Apple has never expressed any ability or interest in search (the major product they offer that includes something adjacent to “search” is itunes, and trying to find anything on that is hot garbage). Frankly, they barely even express interest in software at all outside of the accompanying hardware.
2014 was a long time ago, and Google itself has deteriorated significantly since then (though it had already started deteriorating before then). There are more paid search results, and they’re harder to tell apart from the real results. The results often include synonyms of search terms, which would be fine except they aren’t always synonyms; and the snippet of text for each result used to have the search terms bolded, but now it seems to just be a random bit of text that gets bolded, making it harder to tell if the result is relevant.
It’s really something that, despite the above, all the other search engines are still worse.
Google search is crap
The failure is in the industry failing to create an adequate search engine that helps me find things without rewording my search a dozen times. The capitalism, as we’re doing it with search engines, sucks. And if Google was a state search engine, the right would be quick to blame socialist ideology for its failings.
Doing web-research, it takes me longer and more dives across several platforms to get results that I could have gotten with a single search in 2013. I’ve had to completely revise my strategies to get similar results.
It’s not just Google.
Search engines want to either a) sell me something off Amazon or Ebay or b) show me porn, once it’s decided by my keywords that I must be looking for porn, and will give me false negatives on five or more forced keywords. (Hits surface if I ask for the right keywords, even when the wrong keywords are included in the page.)
Oh, there’s also the fun bit that if I’m looking for an old reference to a keyword but there’s a new thing that uses that keyword, then all the hits go there. It’s how I know the Ataris did Boys of Summer and Luke Combs did Fast Car.
I suspect enshittification.
Switched to DuckDuckGo a year ago and haven’t missed google at all. Thought it would be worse but it has been surprisingly good
Google is crap, but it's free crap
If you ever tried Neeva, it was realy good search, no ads, no data collection, but not free, 5$ a month.
Neeva started innovating on search, which made you realize that Google search as a product has stagnated for a decade.
Then AI blew things wide open, Neeva had an AI product (a lot like Perplexity). In the end they just could not keep up.
And Google is FREE. Well actually you are paying with your data…
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Re: Community Notes 2
The same Matthew Bennett has argued that Twitter, a non-government entity, should not be allowed to voluntarily remove TOS-breaking content (such as hate speech) or misinformation (notwithstanding the fact that most of the time old Twitter did not remove it but merely added more information).
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Re: Re:
Actually, no, I’ve argued that they should not be able to do so at government request. Several courts have agreed that this happened and is in violation of the 1A.
Re: Re: Re:
It’s funny that you haven’t thought of the fact that it’s only people like you who bring up these “court cases”. Have you ever wondered why that is? And I’m not talking about random people on the internet here.
Re: Re: Re:
You mean this First Amendment? Can you point to where Twitter has the power to pass laws telling you what you can and can’t say? Didn’t think so.
Re:
Community notes: Linked Article is an article complaining that Techdirt users consistently flag Matthew Bennett’s comments. This may be a feature, not a bug, however.
I think the only way to handle it is to recognize that “protect competition, not competitors” is an invalid statement because without competitors there is no competition. If Google attains dominance entirely legally simply because they make a product that’s that much better, it’s still a problem just as much as if they’d used illegal methods to gain that dominance. As long as that goes unacknowledged, we’re stuck.
As for how to deal with them, I’ve got no satisfactory ideas. Regulation has it’s pitfalls, mainly political. Breaking them up isn’t going to work because of how the Internet works. Breaking them apart might work, separating their advertising business from the search engine so the two can’t create a feedback loop that reinforces dominance, but keeping them separated is a hard problem and requires regulation, see previous.
Also, anti-monopoly is somewhat different from anti-trust. Anti-trust laws came about not to deal with single companies becoming too large but to handle multiple companies colluding to control a market. The two are closely related but not the same thing and the solutions needed are different.
Re:
so the two can’t create a feedback loop that reinforces dominance
If we assume that the search engine is actually the best product, then it remains irrelevant whether or not this feedback loop exists. Getting rid of it doesn’t at all address the problem of it being the best.
The closest you can get to a “solution” to something like this being the best, is eliminating laws around trade secrets, theft/improper use of business information, and banning related contractual obligations, so as to allow employees to sell Google’s search engine to its competitors, who can then use it themselves without consequence.
Anti-trust laws came about not to deal with single companies becoming too large but to handle multiple companies colluding to control a market.
This is just wrong.
The Sherman Act prohibited both anti-competitive agreements (covering limited types of collusion), and unilateral action to monopolize the market. Section 1 covers collusion. Section 2 covers monopolization. Section 3 covers jurisdiction in US territories and DC.
The most famous usage of the Sherman Act is the breakup of Standard Oil, which was entirely the latter.
Now, because of how the government focused enforcement efforts onto collusion in the early years of the act, and how the courts interpreted the term monopolization, the unintentional outcome of the law actually resulted in increased monopolization, even as it decreased some types of collusion. But that isn’t because the law didn’t intend to deal with both, it’s because the law was poorly built.
The Clayton Act expanded on the types of collusion covered, and expanded the types of mergers and acquisitions which could be considered a monopolization of the market, in addition to better defining what monopolization should mean.
Except it isn't
Not much risk of Google being the best search engine. Or if it is, that’s just because others aren’t even trying.
The other day I was looking for song lyrics, with both AdBlock and NoScript. On Google, the top five hits all lead to websites that won’t show me the lyrics because of “advertising” or “suspicious connections” because of the aforementioned plugins.
We all know the real reason: spam. Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, they all have the ability to downrank sites based on absurd requirements, and it would only benefit the end user. Will they ever do so? Don’t cross your fingers. But it’s not because they can’t.
Re:
It’d be nice if Google would down-rank sites for shit like that. But Google Search does the same damn thing (works maybe 20-30% of the time in Tor Browser), so it’s not gonna happen.
I use searx randomizer
Google used to be the best search engine but lately its AIs are too smart, its knowledge of your search history too long, and its search results biased in favor of its own companies and it prefers not to use links to other competing search engines. Also its search results redirect through google so it knows what you clicked on.
https://searx.neocities.org
sends you to randomised opensource searx instances.
It is sometimes slow, sometimes instances get banned by google for doing too many searches, (google doesn’t like other servers doing automated searches on google, who knew?) but the results are usually different and interesting.
Mike, you’re not wrong, but you’re very far from right. The problem is that you need to do some research.
There are all kinds of ways of dealing with monopolies. You can regulate them, like utilities. You can split them up, like Standard Oil or ATT. You can force spin-offs, like spinning off YouTube from Google, or spinning off Google’s ad auction business from its search business-the search business would bid on ads.
The answer is almost never to just let the monopolist keep on monopolizing. With maybe one hour of homework–hell, three hours farmed out to an intern–you could know this. Instead, you wrote something that to me looks intellectually lazy.
Lastly, let’s not overlook that Google’s monopoly position isn’t the benign result of market forces–Google aggressively bought out competitors.
So there’s another perspective.
What I’m seeing here is a bunch of ABM’ers, (Anything But Microsoft), V 2.0
Back in the late 2000’s, Europe tried to force Microsoft to not set Internet Explorer as the default browser in Windows. This effort was led by nerds who thought they could dictate to the much, much greater non-nerd population just what they could use, and more importantly, what they should not use for a browser. That effort failed miserably in the US, but took hold in the EU. Setting up a menu choice during the installation merely took one more mouse click for the user to install IE as the default browser, and the user was off and running with the software they wanted to use in the first place. Microsoft suffered about zero dollars at the cash register. (By the way, that brou-ha-ha is still going on, in a low-key form, but nonetheless, the EU has never actually said, “OK, it’s over now, everyone back in the pool”.
Today, it’s deja vu all over again, substituting the new “Evil Empire” for the old “Evil Empire”.
)
Listen up, nerds – you don’t know any better than the rest of the world’s computer users. You just don’t. You can hold a PhD in computer science, and you still don’t know better than Joe Bleaux what works best for him. Not for you, for him. It’s his money, let him spend it the way he wants, OK?
My real question to you is, why are you so Hell bent on telling others that if they use non-ABG search engines (or non-ABM browsers), then they’re obviously morons? And just who appointed you nerds as judge, jury and executioners, eh? That’s what I want to know. After all, God is willing to wait until they die before judging them, who are you to jump in line ahead of Him??
And a quick edit for all you complainers: If you bring me a problem, then you also better bring me a proposed solution. Otherwise, sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up!
Re:
Sure, it’s called economic warfare (which is illegal). Just buy and hold all available Google (or company of choice) stock and never cash out.
Worst case scenario, the Republicans have forced armed insurrection into the conversation, so…
Hey, you wanted solutions. You never said you wanted hem to be good or legal solutions.
It's interesting to contrast your Google/Search engine arguments with T-Mobile/Cellular arguments.
I regularly switch between Google and Bing for my search queries, often issuing the same query to both engines.
I’ve been a subscriber to AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile in the past, and vastly prefer the offerings of T-Mobile. I’m currently a Google Fi subscriber, using the T-Mobile network from an iPhone.
Changing your search engine is easy, just start with a different URL.
Changing cellular carriers is as bad as all the issues related to healthcare in the USA.
You can’t easily change jobs because your healthcare is most likely tied to your job. You can’t move between states, because healthcare options are different in different states. Healthcare and Cellular networks are focused on state or nation level markets while search engines are attempting to work internationally and running into legal issues with each of the nations attempting to enforce their own rules on the internet in general.
Microsoft
Microsoft may have had the best internet browser, but it was increasingly non-standard. We really would not be where we are today if Microsoft had retained its monopoly power.
Re: best internet browser?
What? No! It never did. Not even close. It had the monopoly power to make its browser the default.
It still has the monopoly on PC operating systems and it still makes its browser the default. But most computers now run Android and use chrome.
Re: Re:
Well, if you don’t count Macs, which were called “PCs” in the 1980s and have been PCs in the modern sense since 2005.
As for “best” browsers, that’s an inherently subjective thing. Remember that Netscape was not free in the early Internet Explorer days, which for many people was a point against it.
Re: Re: Re:
Windows 70% of the pc market and I expect pc manufacturers still face the Microsoft tax.
Hmmm. Why say it then.
Really? That’s going a long way back. Internet Explorer was never free, except on Macs.
Re: Re: Re:2 "
Uh… because you wrote “No!” as if the idea of Internet Explorer being better was counterfactual, not just a difference of opinion.
Of course it was (in terms of cost rather than software freedom). After being part of the paid “Plus!” package, it was released as a free download. I downloaded it, and I was too young to have a credit card in those days.
“Intel Vice-president Steven McGeady, called as a witness [in the MS anti-trust trial], quoted Paul Maritz, a senior Microsoft vice president, as having stated an intention to ‘extinguish’ and ‘smother’ rival Netscape Communications Corporation and to ‘cut off Netscape’s air supply’ by giving away a clone of Netscape’s flagship product for free.”
Dealing with monopolies
You’re not wrong, but pretty far from right. The problem is the lack of research
There are all kinds of ways of dealing with monopolies. You can regulate them, like utilities. You can split them up, like Standard Oil or ATT. You can force spin-offs, like spinning off YouTube from Google, or spinning off Google’s ad auction business from its search business-the search business would bid on ads or vice-versa, or both.
The answer is almost never to just let the monopolist keep on monopolizing. Maybe one hour of homework–hell, three hours farmed out to an intern–would show this. Instead, this analysis intellectually lazy, mostly confirming priors.
Lastly, let’s not overlook that Google’s monopoly position isn’t the benign result of market forces–Google aggressively bought out competitors.
Search Moat Stack
The market (for search & search advertising) is best seen through the Search Moat Stack lens: Google-Chrome-Android, Bing-Edge-Windows, Google-Safari-xOS. The Google-Apple deal means Google has almost all the market, and virtually 100% on mobile [0].
As you noted alternatives are fighting over a small slice which is mostly Search-Firefox-OS. Which Google has bought the default for. Point taken on Yahoo! but it’s 2023 not 2014.
But don’t take my word for it. An email frpm Google’s VP Android Partnerships Jim Kolotourus, revealed in the trial says [1]; “Chrome exists to serve Google Search. and if it cannot do that because it is regulated to be set by the user, the value of users using Chrome goes to almost zero”
[0] https://blog.mojeek.com/2022/05/gatekeepers-of-the-western-web.html
[1] https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-10/417343.pdf
Not what you said
Coincidence is not the same as consequence. What exactly people did not like? Why do you think people left Firefox because of this? Because I sure remember Firefox doing bad decisions for quite a while.
Re:
Yeah, but any time we point it out, people show up to tell us how they’re actually good decisions, and us “power users” are just wrong. Ordinary people don’t mind when a browser phones home without consent, they’ll benefit from Pocket, and why would anyone ever want to remove that puzzle piece icon (“extensions”) from their toolbar?
Sure, ordinary people don’t seek out new browsers, and the people still using Firefox have gotten much less enthusiastic about recommending it, but there’s no foreseeable problem there, right?
Anti trust
It’s easy to claim that antitrust is the least efficient way to increase competition, much harder to show a better way. I assume that’s why you didn’t.
Antitrust isn’t intended to create competitors. It’s intended to break up monopolies so that the market can create competition. Are you saying that you don’t believe in free markets? That’s how it reads.
Re:
Keeping the status quo is a way. “We have to do something. This is something.” So is doing nothing and waiting for new search engines to pop up and improve. It might be better than antitrust in the case of Google’s search engine. In light of the failed Yahoo search engine deal with Firefox, it’s reasonable to treat relative search engine popularity as an approximation of relative search engine quality i.e. product quality. It can be simultaneously true that Google would benefit from cutting deals for defaults, but the product quality doesn’t disappear from the competition equation. Without additional evidence (such as evaluation of switching costs, which are much lower for search engines than for person-to-person communication services), search engine deals are not necessarily anticompetitive.
There already is low-hanging fruit in Google’s ads. While in theory adding weaker arguments shouldn’t weaken accompanying strong arguments, in practice mixing weak arguments with strong arguments makes the audience members (including judges) doubt the overarching message and hence the strong arguments. Proving harm to users of Google search is looking pretty hard, but proving harm to buyers of Google ads seems pretty easy, and the FTC might be more likely to convince judges to break up Google by ignoring the search engine market in favor of focusing on the ad market.
I would like Congress to make a privacy law declaring privacy violations such as most non-consensual collection of and non-consensual sharing of personal information to be consumer harm per se to all Google service users and users of websites running Google ads, but I digress.
Wrong question?
I am not convinced that Alphabet is paying Apple in order to ensure Google’s search dominance so much as to ensure some kind of data access to virtually everyone who uses a phone — they already get Android users so the payment to Apple is to secure some kind of access to the rest which otherwise would be denied to them.
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What a hack you are
From Google’s former PR guy
https://x.com/william_fitz/status/1724844377707782384?s=46
Re: Exaggerating
From the first link in this article.
Re: Re: Brain fart
I wrote the previous comment and made a mistake. The link I was referring is the second link in this article, not the first. I meant to say “a link in the first paragraph” rather than “the first link”, but I mixed my thoughts up with “the second link”.
Re: Re: Everything [advertising] seems to run through Google
This is an awesome justification for adblocking as routine internet hygiene.
It’s also explanation for how Google wanted to DRM the web to kill adblocking, and only strengthened adblocker offerings in the process.
Cop search engine don't you mean?
Google will 100% re-routw your traffic to the feds to put you on a watchlist. Nordvpn caught it.
I miss AltaVista. It was so much better. 👨🏼💼
“…Google […] pays to have its search placed as the default on Safari and other browsers/phones.”
You’re right, that’s not antitrust unless Alphabet also pays to make it impossible for device users to access any other search engine, and I can still access One Search and DuckDuckGo through Opera Mini, which also has Google as its default search engine.
I quit FF for a while
When that change came to Firefox, I opened it one day and my search had been changed to Yahoo, without asking my consent or even informing me. I was livid. That was the behavior of malware and I wasn’t having it from Mozilla, a company that damned well ought to know better. I deleted it and switched to a fork called Pale Moon for a year or two. I went back to FF after their “Quantum” update and its performance improvements, but I’ve never recommended it again.
The abuse is the problem
A lot of Apple-centric folks are focused on the iOS deal, but that’s hardly the only issue. Google abuses their monopoly to rig ad auctions – literally the source of that revenue they share with Apple. Those higher costs don’t just go away, they’re passed on to all of us. I could go on but the information is out there for those who want to keep up.
Google is a better search engine. Bing could offer Apple a bigger cut and probably still not get the deal.
Correlation is not necessarily causation
Sorry for the late post, but..
Firefox has had a variety of competitive problems in recent years that had NOTHING to do with what search engine was at the top of their multi-search-engine picker in the browser.
Firefox made the switch to Yahoo as their default search engine in December 2014.
But according to Statcounter, over the year prior to that, Chrome’s browser market share had already jumped from 35.85% to 42.24% in November before declining to 40.93% by the end of the year as Internet Explorer made a late surge.
Meanwhile, Firefox marketshare started 2014 at 14.77%, and further declined to 11.27% by the end of the year before the Yahoo deal could have made any significant impact on Firefox’s business.
And a year later by the end of 2015, the Chrome juggernaut had increased its marketshare to 47.14%, while Firefox was down to 8.83%.
Meanwhile, Internet Explorer had dropped from 13.3% of the market to 9.33%, an even steeper drop than Firefox that year. And IE could not use Yahoo as an excuse for that.
Today Chrome is at 64% share, but that’s only Google’s “retail” browser. The vast majority of browsers in the market today (including Microsoft’s) are based on Chromium, the open-source foundation of Chrome. If you add all those up the only significant alternative platform these days is Safari at 18.6%.