| ▲ | __loam 4 days ago |
| Search is an essential utility used by basically everyone on the planet with an internet connection. Google has a lock on 96% of that traffic and has increasingly made business decisions with respect to search that hurt the quality of the results and hurt both consumers and the people who get indexed by search. Google can unilaterally destroy your business with small opaque algorithm tweaks. They also increasingly have a monopoly on the browser, making decisions like deprecating support for ad blocking because it hurts the business. Google makes about 16-22 billion dollars a quarter in profit but they still do layoffs and they still make decisions that harm consumers but help their own short term growth. Search is a basic utility that is essential to the function of the internet. It's like water and electricity. There are huge structural barriers to being able to compete in that market, so if we care at all about basic economic theory, Google probably ought to at least be operated as a non-profit, and realistically be subject to massive anti-trust enforcement considering they are the modern robber barons on top of our communication networks. |
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| ▲ | EasyMark 4 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| Also you can be heavily invested in Google apps and then one day suddenly google cuts you off and all you are ever going to get to talk is some email/chat bot who does not care to elevate a situation for you. Imagine having all your business docs, customer docs, and processes in google app suite and then just suddenly be cut off. It won’t happen with me since I avoid that situation, but what happens when google glitches and your small business folds because you can’t get to its data? |
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| ▲ | dismalaf 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| There's search engines other than Google and there's very, very minimal barriers to using a different search engine; literally just type in Bing.com instead of Google.com. Hell, if you're on MS Windows which has a similar monopoly on desktop devices, Bing will be shoved in your face over, over and over again and using Google actually requires more effort... |
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| ▲ | __loam 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Most of them use Bing's indexes on the backend and some competition does not mean that Google doesn't have monopoly power over the market. Firefox exists but Chrome still has a much larger share of the market. | | |
| ▲ | YetAnotherNick 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Just because something has monopoly because of being better shouldn't result in antitrust. Even in the browser case, Google is very active in standardisation, and also pays Firefox. Though I think we should definitely ban things like Google search engine advertising Google Chrome for free. | | |
| ▲ | _aavaa_ 3 days ago | parent [-] | | But it's active in standardization in a way that helps Google's business specifically, not the market as a whole. |
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| ▲ | sdwr 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| On the other hand, search is not a commodity that can be dispensed in interchangable units. Those opaque tweaks that tank your business are the same ones that keep spam and SEO garbage down. |
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| ▲ | __loam 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I agree that Google has an obligation to keep search results high quality but they're failing at that while also screwing over legitimate businesses. | | |
| ▲ | nickff 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | It seems like high-quality search is a very difficult task, largely due to their adversarial relationship with ‘spammers’. If someone else can do a better job, I’m sure their service will quickly capture the market. | | |
| ▲ | __loam 4 days ago | parent [-] | | The problem with monopolistic markets is that the new service won't quickly capture the market lol. That's why the DoJ is going after them, there are meaningful barriers to competition that creates incentives for Google to choose value for their business over maintaining a high quality service. | | |
| ▲ | nickff 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I am not sure that web search is a monopolistic market, though it seems that Google is the dominant player. Google itself wasn't the first player, and managed to capture a large market share from established incumbents. Why do you think that competitors couldn't quickly capture the market? You seem to think this is an obvious fact, but I don't see why, as switching costs are very low. It seems to me that the important market is online ads (which is where other companies focus), and that Google is the only company willing to invest in web search. | | |
| ▲ | __loam 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Building a web index and search service to compete with Google requires huge capital expenditures and going up against a network effect that Google exerts on the market (often by paying other companies to be the default). The only company to marginally succeed is Microsoft, and virtually every other search service uses Bing's index on their backend. The cost of switching is low but the barriers to participating meaningfully in the market are high. | | |
| ▲ | nickff 3 days ago | parent [-] | | How is search a network effects business? It seems to me that each additional user would contribute less than the previous one, as opposed to Metcalfe's law (where each additional user adds more value than the last). How would paying to be a default be a network effect? Perhaps the capital cost to competing with Google is high, but if it were worth it, there are a number of firms which could afford it; it seems like it's just not worth it. | | |
| ▲ | __loam 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Maybe network effect isn't the right way to describe it but clearly Google has a ton of inertia here since their company is literally the verb for search. | | |
| ▲ | nickff 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I agree that Google has a lot of inertia in both search and search advertising. That still doesn’t answer why there aren’t more well-capitalized companies trying to win the search market. I suspect (but am not sure that) the answer is the market is more visible than it is worthwhile (somewhat akin to media and entertainment businesses). |
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| ▲ | YetAnotherNick 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's not at all correct. Duckduckgo had 100 million searches a day[1], and its selling point was privacy friendly search, which has lot lot smaller market than better results. If someone develops better ranking, people would switch very fast. [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20221118045948/https://duckduckg... |
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| ▲ | NBJack 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | The only reason in many cases other search engines are 'better' at spam is the lack of attention given to it for SEO optimization. It is in many ways akin to saying Macs don't get viruses; rest assured, there are, and as Macs become more prevalent in the business sector for office use, there will be a huge incentive to accelerate it even more. |
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| ▲ | bsder 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Those opaque tweaks that tank your business are the same ones that keep spam and SEO garbage down. Um, except that they don't? We had entire articles detailing how "Forbes" dominates search rankings with SEO garbage. Keeping SEO garbage down appears to be very straightforward. It's just incompatible with an ad-driven business model. | | |
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| ▲ | bdangubic 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| holy sh*t what a comment!!! why stop here though, lets make ecommerce an essential utility and turn over amazon to the government too! and of course we all need to go somewhere so we should turn over tesla and all the other car companies to the government too! heck now that I re-read your comment I think we should forbid profit altogether and make sure all businesses in America are non-profit, utility-for-all! |
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| ▲ | __loam 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Amazon does have an oligopoly over utility computing along with ms and Google. They run like 60% of the internet on AWS. Tesla obviously does not have a monopoly on cars or even electric vehicles. You can believe whatever you like but it's simple economics that big tech companies have monopoly power over their markets. Denying that is pretty baffling but this is Hackernews so I'm not sure what I expected. | | |
| ▲ | whatever1 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I don’t think that you can make the case that the existence of aws has made access to cloud services more expensive. There is a ton of vendors who are competing on price. Although to be fair once you pick a vendor you are locked in their ecosystem. There is definitely friction in the market. | |
| ▲ | bdangubic 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | you may want to move to another country though mate… free market, we all have alternatives (kagi, bing, chapgpt for search, temu, target, walmart… for ecomm, azure/google/oracle/ali for cloud…) … if every successful business was eventually treated by the likes of you as “utility” it’d be a hoot of a society | | |
| ▲ | __loam 3 days ago | parent [-] | | The US has been enforcing anti-trust law for over a century including against tech companies like Microsoft. |
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