6 ms·

Google rejects EU's search abuse complaint

48 points by Libertatea 11y ago

ewzimm 11y ago
The only thing that seems suspicious there is the claim that traffic to aggregators has increased by 227% in the last decade. Overall Google traffic has increased by something like 500% in the last decade, so that would indicate a decrease in the percentage of redirections. I'm not sure if shopping aggregators are more or less popular, but that still seems like a deceptive number.
- dynofuz 11y ago
  and they only started displaying the product ads in the last 3-4 years. What happened to other shopping site traffic in that period?
- cromwellian 11y ago
  Just because overall traffic increased 500% that doesn't imply a decrease if you don't know what the distribution of searches are. If most of that 500% were looking for sports scores for example, then a 227% increase would be very impressive. Without more detailed data I don't think you can draw any conclusions.
  - ewzimm 11y ago
    Yes, that's what I mean about not knowing if aggregators got more or less popular over the last decade. I'm still not sure, but from a few searches, here's what I got: Google Shopping is the #1 shopping aggregator according to this site: http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/shopping-websites http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/shopping-websites The #2 Coupons.com, is going downhill fast: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/coupons.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/coupons.com The #3, Bizrate.com, is also going downhill fast: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/bizrate.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/bizrate.com So it does seem like Google Shopping is taking over traffic from other aggregators.
    - merb 11y ago
      All 3 aren't widely used in the EU. Especially not in Germany where the people from the EU who said these things coming from. Also the biggest price aggregator from Germany, Austria and others, are still rising and rising according to Alexa. I mean less people go through searches to these sites however thats caused by the fact that they have a really easy name. What the EU government does is toxic. It does what it get's told by smaller companies that aren't satisfied with their sales. Thats more than toxic since it changes the free market, however thats what the european government always did, they don't make goods for the people they make goods for the money.
      - ewzimm 11y ago
        Google Shopping isn't usually accessed directly but rather through the main Google search. Good to hear that there are other ones rising too.
    - dingaling 11y ago
      Not being familiar with any of those ( probably a sheltered UK life ), I went to www.coupons.com to see what it's about. At the bottom of the page is an About.. link, but they have infinite scrolling and I'm not fast enough to catch it. Quite an awful UI.
  - tyingq 11y ago
    Some background that's related. http://graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc-report/img/ftc-ocr-watermark.pdf http://graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc-report/img/ftc-ocr-waterm...
- ChuckMcM 11y ago
  One of the interesting counter arguments (one in favor of monopoly) is that Google went from spending $337M a quarter on "paid distribution" (paying people to send their search traffic to Google) in Q1 2011, to $968M/qtr for paid distribution in Q4 2014. So Google is spending nearly $4 billion dollars a year to send traffic to their web site. They can do that because their ad business is very profitable, but how much of that 'value' is because its worthwhile? And how much because its got the most volume? One argument would be that Google's dominant position in the search advertising market allows them to fund this giant traffic buy, which prevents competitors from entering the search market. That is the classic Sherman Antitrust violation kind of thing in the US (and I believe much of the basis for the US Microsoft case where things were forced to be bundled by OEMs providing windows on their platforms, using Microsoft's dominant OS position to force their browser (internet explorer) on to the masses. The trick is search an adjacent market to search advertising or the same market? I don't know, I can imagine arguing either side of that question. Personally, I see Google's eroding CPC numbers as a sign they are losing their dominant position organically. It may not be happening as quickly as some competitors would like but it seems to be consistent. I also see that squeezing margins and driving changes like Alphabet, but that is simply speculation. As a shareholder I think their decision to 'fight' here is probably not in their best interest long term (so many companies come out the other side of an anti-trust fight damaged for years and years).
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
magicalist 11y ago
Wait, was the EU statement of objections only about comparison shopping?
- kuschku 11y ago
  No, not at all. The statement was mostly about Google scraping data and not linking back. One case: They post a review about a restaurant on Yelp! Soon later Google Places displayed the same review text, but did not link back to Yelp! When Yelp! complained, Google suggested Yelp! should just use robots.txt to unlist their site complete, or put up with the scraping. In return, Yelp! and other companies went to the EU and complained.
  - magicalist 11y ago
    > No, not at all. > The statement was mostly about Google scraping data and not linking back That's been somewhat the narrative around here, but that doesn't appear to be true at all: > The Statement of Objections takes the preliminary view that in order to remedy the conduct, Google should treat its own comparison shopping service and those of rivals in the same way. This would not interfere with either the algorithms Google applies or how it designs its search results pages. It would, however, mean that when Google shows comparison shopping services in response to a user's query, the most relevant service or services would be selected to appear in Google's search results pages. http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-15-4781_en.htm http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-15-4781_en.htm I didn't realize this. I thought it was more wide ranging.
    - germanier 11y ago
      There is a separate formal investigation on Android currently: http://ec.europa.eu/competition/elojade/isef/case_details.cfm?proc_code=1_40099 http://ec.europa.eu/competition/elojade/isef/case_details.cf... Additionally, the EC currently looks into Google's "copying of rivals’ web content (known as 'scraping'), exclusivity in its agreements with advertising partners and undue restrictions of advertisers' ability to use competing advertising platforms" (http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_STATEMENT-15-4785_en.htm http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_STATEMENT-15-4785_en.ht...) but that hasn't reached the formal stage yet.
kazinator 11y ago
Google has the right to make whatever content they want appear when you navigate to their website and type something into the search box. Just like you and I have a right to put nearly whatever we want in our private web page. They are not a public utility. If you don't like what you see on Google, go search somewhere else. If you don't like anywhere else, then run your own web crawler and build your own index. The world does not owe you a spam-free, ad-free, impartial, quasi-complete search index with a query engine that responds in under a second. Such a thing takes a lot of research and money to produce and operate.
- necessity 11y ago
  >Google has the right to make whatever content they want appear when you navigate to their website Except they don't. Government can regulate what content can and cannot be shown (e.g. "The right to be forgotten"). I disagree with UE's decisions and the principle behind it (anti-trust policies), but they have the authority to do so. If they should have this authority and how far it should stretch is a rather large debate and prone to flaming.
  - kazinator 11y ago
    > Government can regulate what content can and cannot be shown (e.g. "The right to be forgotten") Sure, and "hate speech" laws and illegal materials. But they cannot regulate you, for instance, into showing something that you are not showing. Suppose I run a search engine and some politician is against my organization. I can drop most positive entries related to that politician from my index, keeping mostly the ones that point to negative material.
    - riffraff 11y ago
      they can, and they did, for example, for the browser ballot in windows.
      - DannyBee 11y ago
        This was not a law, and so a very different situation. This was a court ordered remedy for a conviction. Courts generally have the power to fashion appropriate remedies, and yes, sometimes they involve compelling speech or other things. (Some of these remedies have been struck down depending on what they have been forced to say or not say).
dogma1138 11y ago
"If users search for "price comparison" they will get Google's own ads before links to rival services" Ehm no it wont.... If you search for price comparison you get nothing but price comparison sites, if you search for price comparison computers you get nothing but price comparison sites again, if you search for price comparison [buy] computers you will get some direct advertisement with prices. I've started using Google Shopping in many cases it finds items which are cheaper than Amazon (for the most part discounting Argos and some other bigbox marts the cheapest Retailers in the UK at least as far as London goes). Unlike many price comparison sites it's easy enough to find a local store near you with the item you need in case of an emergency (If it's not on Amazon now ;)) and some times the price difference can be sufficient to not use a service like Amazon (30 days no hassle return is more than worth the occasional premium on Amazon for me). While I understand that this might be driving some people out of business price compression sites are just behind the curve and as "skewing" search results go than those sites are a much bigger offender than Google is. Heck if i got to Pricegrabber (UK) now and search for "lenovo yoga 2 pro" I only get 1 relevant result on the 1st unfiltered page for what i want for 999gbp if I click the filters on the left and select laptop computers that result wont be shown, that result wont show up and the lowest result will be for 1098 GBP. If i use Google Shopping i only get relevant results, the cheapest one is for a refurbished 494GBP and the cheapest new one is for 539 for a better model that there is on Pricegrabber.... The price comparison sites are just utter garbage, they don't update the product pages, they don't verify if the product is in stock or not, they don't give you alternative options and they give you an order of magnitude less results. Google just grabs everything from it's index, the EU complaints is like telling email providers in the 90's that they need to stop offering mail-to-fax services and telegram services because it hurts the postal service... If pricerunner, pricegrabber and the 1000 other price comparison sites weren't utter garbage this wouldn't be an issue you cannot legislate progress or lack of it.

48 points by Libertatea 11y ago

The only thing that seems suspicious there is the claim that traffic to aggregators has increased by 227% in the last decade. Overall Google traffic has increased by something like 500% in the last decade, so that would indicate a decrease in the percentage of redirections. I'm not sure if shopping aggregators are more or less popular, but that still seems like a deceptive number.

dynofuz 11y ago
and they only started displaying the product ads in the last 3-4 years. What happened to other shopping site traffic in that period?
cromwellian 11y ago
Just because overall traffic increased 500% that doesn't imply a decrease if you don't know what the distribution of searches are. If most of that 500% were looking for sports scores for example, then a 227% increase would be very impressive. Without more detailed data I don't think you can draw any conclusions.
- ewzimm 11y ago
  Yes, that's what I mean about not knowing if aggregators got more or less popular over the last decade. I'm still not sure, but from a few searches, here's what I got: Google Shopping is the #1 shopping aggregator according to this site: http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/shopping-websites http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/shopping-websites The #2 Coupons.com, is going downhill fast: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/coupons.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/coupons.com The #3, Bizrate.com, is also going downhill fast: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/bizrate.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/bizrate.com So it does seem like Google Shopping is taking over traffic from other aggregators.
  - merb 11y ago
    All 3 aren't widely used in the EU. Especially not in Germany where the people from the EU who said these things coming from. Also the biggest price aggregator from Germany, Austria and others, are still rising and rising according to Alexa. I mean less people go through searches to these sites however thats caused by the fact that they have a really easy name. What the EU government does is toxic. It does what it get's told by smaller companies that aren't satisfied with their sales. Thats more than toxic since it changes the free market, however thats what the european government always did, they don't make goods for the people they make goods for the money.
    - ewzimm 11y ago
      Google Shopping isn't usually accessed directly but rather through the main Google search. Good to hear that there are other ones rising too.
  - dingaling 11y ago
    Not being familiar with any of those ( probably a sheltered UK life ), I went to www.coupons.com to see what it's about. At the bottom of the page is an About.. link, but they have infinite scrolling and I'm not fast enough to catch it. Quite an awful UI.
- tyingq 11y ago
  Some background that's related. http://graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc-report/img/ftc-ocr-watermark.pdf http://graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc-report/img/ftc-ocr-waterm...
ChuckMcM 11y ago
One of the interesting counter arguments (one in favor of monopoly) is that Google went from spending $337M a quarter on "paid distribution" (paying people to send their search traffic to Google) in Q1 2011, to $968M/qtr for paid distribution in Q4 2014. So Google is spending nearly $4 billion dollars a year to send traffic to their web site. They can do that because their ad business is very profitable, but how much of that 'value' is because its worthwhile? And how much because its got the most volume? One argument would be that Google's dominant position in the search advertising market allows them to fund this giant traffic buy, which prevents competitors from entering the search market. That is the classic Sherman Antitrust violation kind of thing in the US (and I believe much of the basis for the US Microsoft case where things were forced to be bundled by OEMs providing windows on their platforms, using Microsoft's dominant OS position to force their browser (internet explorer) on to the masses. The trick is search an adjacent market to search advertising or the same market? I don't know, I can imagine arguing either side of that question. Personally, I see Google's eroding CPC numbers as a sign they are losing their dominant position organically. It may not be happening as quickly as some competitors would like but it seems to be consistent. I also see that squeezing margins and driving changes like Alphabet, but that is simply speculation. As a shareholder I think their decision to 'fight' here is probably not in their best interest long term (so many companies come out the other side of an anti-trust fight damaged for years and years).

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

magicalist 11y ago

Wait, was the EU statement of objections only about comparison shopping?

kuschku 11y ago
No, not at all. The statement was mostly about Google scraping data and not linking back. One case: They post a review about a restaurant on Yelp! Soon later Google Places displayed the same review text, but did not link back to Yelp! When Yelp! complained, Google suggested Yelp! should just use robots.txt to unlist their site complete, or put up with the scraping. In return, Yelp! and other companies went to the EU and complained.
- magicalist 11y ago
  > No, not at all. > The statement was mostly about Google scraping data and not linking back That's been somewhat the narrative around here, but that doesn't appear to be true at all: > The Statement of Objections takes the preliminary view that in order to remedy the conduct, Google should treat its own comparison shopping service and those of rivals in the same way. This would not interfere with either the algorithms Google applies or how it designs its search results pages. It would, however, mean that when Google shows comparison shopping services in response to a user's query, the most relevant service or services would be selected to appear in Google's search results pages. http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-15-4781_en.htm http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-15-4781_en.htm I didn't realize this. I thought it was more wide ranging.
  - germanier 11y ago
    There is a separate formal investigation on Android currently: http://ec.europa.eu/competition/elojade/isef/case_details.cfm?proc_code=1_40099 http://ec.europa.eu/competition/elojade/isef/case_details.cf... Additionally, the EC currently looks into Google's "copying of rivals’ web content (known as 'scraping'), exclusivity in its agreements with advertising partners and undue restrictions of advertisers' ability to use competing advertising platforms" (http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_STATEMENT-15-4785_en.htm http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_STATEMENT-15-4785_en.ht...) but that hasn't reached the formal stage yet.

kazinator 11y ago

Google has the right to make whatever content they want appear when you navigate to their website and type something into the search box. Just like you and I have a right to put nearly whatever we want in our private web page. They are not a public utility. If you don't like what you see on Google, go search somewhere else. If you don't like anywhere else, then run your own web crawler and build your own index. The world does not owe you a spam-free, ad-free, impartial, quasi-complete search index with a query engine that responds in under a second. Such a thing takes a lot of research and money to produce and operate.

necessity 11y ago
>Google has the right to make whatever content they want appear when you navigate to their website Except they don't. Government can regulate what content can and cannot be shown (e.g. "The right to be forgotten"). I disagree with UE's decisions and the principle behind it (anti-trust policies), but they have the authority to do so. If they should have this authority and how far it should stretch is a rather large debate and prone to flaming.
- kazinator 11y ago
  > Government can regulate what content can and cannot be shown (e.g. "The right to be forgotten") Sure, and "hate speech" laws and illegal materials. But they cannot regulate you, for instance, into showing something that you are not showing. Suppose I run a search engine and some politician is against my organization. I can drop most positive entries related to that politician from my index, keeping mostly the ones that point to negative material.
  - riffraff 11y ago
    they can, and they did, for example, for the browser ballot in windows.
    - DannyBee 11y ago
      This was not a law, and so a very different situation. This was a court ordered remedy for a conviction. Courts generally have the power to fashion appropriate remedies, and yes, sometimes they involve compelling speech or other things. (Some of these remedies have been struck down depending on what they have been forced to say or not say).

dogma1138 11y ago

"If users search for "price comparison" they will get Google's own ads before links to rival services" Ehm no it wont.... If you search for price comparison you get nothing but price comparison sites, if you search for price comparison computers you get nothing but price comparison sites again, if you search for price comparison [buy] computers you will get some direct advertisement with prices. I've started using Google Shopping in many cases it finds items which are cheaper than Amazon (for the most part discounting Argos and some other bigbox marts the cheapest Retailers in the UK at least as far as London goes). Unlike many price comparison sites it's easy enough to find a local store near you with the item you need in case of an emergency (If it's not on Amazon now ;)) and some times the price difference can be sufficient to not use a service like Amazon (30 days no hassle return is more than worth the occasional premium on Amazon for me). While I understand that this might be driving some people out of business price compression sites are just behind the curve and as "skewing" search results go than those sites are a much bigger offender than Google is. Heck if i got to Pricegrabber (UK) now and search for "lenovo yoga 2 pro" I only get 1 relevant result on the 1st unfiltered page for what i want for 999gbp if I click the filters on the left and select laptop computers that result wont be shown, that result wont show up and the lowest result will be for 1098 GBP. If i use Google Shopping i only get relevant results, the cheapest one is for a refurbished 494GBP and the cheapest new one is for 539 for a better model that there is on Pricegrabber.... The price comparison sites are just utter garbage, they don't update the product pages, they don't verify if the product is in stock or not, they don't give you alternative options and they give you an order of magnitude less results. Google just grabs everything from it's index, the EU complaints is like telling email providers in the 90's that they need to stop offering mail-to-fax services and telegram services because it hurts the postal service... If pricerunner, pricegrabber and the 1000 other price comparison sites weren't utter garbage this wouldn't be an issue you cannot legislate progress or lack of it.