6 ms·

Google is Crushing the Internet

84 points by dforrestwilson 10y ago

aorth 10y ago
> Before rolling it out, Google asked Warner [CelebrityNetWorth.com] if they could scrape his data and credit him. Warner declined, but Google did it anyway. Money quote. Google's rich snippets are friendly to users, but hostile to sites where the data originates.
- beaconstudios 10y ago
  it's the eternal problem with platform-based companies, like Twitter's treatment of developers. Except in Google's case, the platform is the gateway to the internet.
- mattm 10y ago
  One could argue that if a "business" is only providing one sentence answers to questions then it's not really a business in the first place. The owner seemed to have found a very small gap and it was closed shortly after.
  - tchaffee 10y ago
    Google is profiting off those one sentence answers. If it's enough of a business for Google, I suppose it's enough of a business for the people doing the actual work to find the answers.
    - mcintyre1994 10y ago
      Are they actually though - in the immediate term? Sure they show ads on the search result, but there's a box with the answer to your query, why would you click an ad? It seems like the reason it's good for Google is because it's the perfect response to the query and it cements Google as the search engine that can answer my questions. Are they directly profiting from those queries or are they just making themselves a better search engine, and indirectly profiting from that? If the latter I find it hard to argue against them.
      - tchaffee 10y ago
        If they are stealing the data in order to make themselves a better search engine, I find that pretty easy to argue against. Someone did work that provides value and Google is taking that data and making it look like their own.
        AznHisoka 10y ago
        Nobody needs to argue anything. just block google in your robots.txt if you are unhappy. case closed.
        tchaffee 10y ago
        What sites need is a happy medium. For Google to index the site, but to not use that same data to eliminate the need for a visit to the site. Content has value. If Google is grabbing that content and using it on their own site, that's a problem.
- bgw 10y ago
  How are they "hostile to sites where the data originates" when Google is the primary driver of traffic to those sites?
  - tyingq 10y ago
    Because they use an algorithm to extract the data that the searcher is looking for and display it on their site, drastically dropping the chances that anyone clicks through to the site. Whether it's hostile or not, if they continue far enough, it would choke off the sources. People don't tend to invest time in creating content where there's zero chance to interact with the reader, ever. Create a site that takes search queries, and return scraped Google results data. Become popular. See how long it takes before it gets shut down. I do get your high level point, but isn't there some quid-pro-quo involved? People allow Google to crawl, which enriches Google's search product. Some traffic is offered in return for helping their index with high quality content. Edit: If you doubt the effects widgets have on traffic, take a look at what it's done to Wikipedia traffic[1]. The KG entries used to have many, many deep links into Wikipedia. A lot of those links have changed to deep links into Google. [1] https://www.searchenginejournal.com/wikipedias-traffic-from-google-down-11-why-the-drop/138791/ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/wikipedias-traffic-from-...
    - narrowrail 10y ago
      My default search work-flow is 5 keystrokes+$searchquery which gives me wikipedia results which are not always good, but 90% exactly what I need. I try to minimize my use of Google's services at every opportunity, and I'm aggressive with my router's host file (not to mention uMatrix w/ Chromium and Firefox w/ NoScript/RequestPolicy). It bothers me that I can't black-hole Google's domains on my router's host file w/o screwing up too many websites to count (local to international) because so many have built-in Google web resource dependencies (e.g. googleapis/maps/googletagmanager). However, I can't believe your argument makes sense to anyone. It seems publisher's want the benefit of Google's traffic w/o having to deal with users preferring not to click-through when they are looking for a 1 sentence answer. There are legit means to preventing Google from indexing one's site.
fear91 10y ago
I'm wondering when, if ever, the general public will start recognizing Google as one of the "big brothers". Somehow it's still perceived as this "cool" startup but they squash small businesses, avoid taxes, are in bed with intelligence agencies, etc.
- quickben 10y ago
  I'm old enough to remember the techies backlash over targeted advertising in Gmail. It seemed the google's PR started throwing cash at it for years to "educate" the public. The general public appeared to be a complacent herd of sheep like creatures that would embrace convenience over everything. Maybe in your circles Google is "cool". In my circles it's necessary evil. The platform/network effect is so strong there is no escaping it. The US is invested my money wise too deep and won't do what they had the backbone to do with SO and the rest. So, "when, if ever", won't be anytime soon. Meanwhile, innovation suffers. They killed chat protocols interfaces (pure monopoly abuse since they have most users), the buried end-to-end encryption, they killed bunch of competing businesses by promoting their side businesses on the search page higher, etc. Http2 could have had things for the users in it (if one goes through the troubles of upgrading a network layer). Instead it had "cut off download at instant if requested" and other features that made web crawling (though not necessarily browsing and developing) easy. Going forward, they will be cleaning the advertising agency landsccape to get rid out of competition with : Amp ( since they de facto own mobile browsing and Android). Desktop displayed ads (they announced as blocker in chrome, and guess twice whose ads will be allowed through). I can enumerate all day. TLDR: they are out of the 'cool' startup area, and firmly into the deep monopolistic abuse waters.
  - PaulHoule 10y ago
    In the 1990s VCs openly stated they would not fund Microsoft competitors. There is a huge hole of companies that never started to compete with Google today, just the VCs don't talk about it today.
    - tyingq 10y ago
      Pretty big moat though, right? What would the minimum investment be to build something, for just search, that was technically just on par with Google?
empath75 10y ago
I don't have a strong opinion about whether or not google should be regulated or not. However, this guy doesn't seem appreciate the scale of the difficulties that google solved and how much better google was than the competition. They almost single-handedly transformed the internet into a useful tool. Altavista and yahoo were like looking up information in a card catalog in comparison. It wasn't just a first mover advantage. And they followed it up by releasing, an ads platform that made everyone else look like amateur hour, a mail product that was far better than hotmail, a mapping tool much better than MapQuest, and a web browser that was far better than ie or Firefox. They are in the position they're in because they solved a lot of difficult problems and made it look easy. If we ever get to the point that we need as a society to rein them in, we should do it with a full understanding of what they've accomplished. It's bizarre to accuse the company that made the internet into what it is today of somehow crushing it.
- wazoox 10y ago
  Basically you're explaining that they earned a monopoly for a reason. That's true. And there are always true advantages to monopoly (standardization, economy of scale, prices stability ...). However monopolies harm the economy and the public good in the long run. See, that works for any past monopoly: I don't have a strong opinion about whether or not Microsoft should be regulated or not. [...] It's bizarre to accuse the company that made the PC into what it is today of somehow crushing it. I don't have a strong opinion about whether or not AT&T should be regulated or not. [...] It's bizarre to accuse the company that made the telephone into what it is today of somehow crushing it. I don't have a strong opinion about whether or not Standard Oil should be regulated or not. [...] It's bizarre to accuse the company that made the oil industry into what it is today of somehow crushing it.
  - bgw 10y ago
    It has always been strange for me to understand Google search as a monopoly. First, there are competitors. Second, it's free (yes, I know you pay with data). Third, you can use the internet without using any of Google's services (except adsense, I suppose). How is Google's search a monopoly when it's the user who is deciding they prefer it to Bing or Duck Duck Go or Yahoo? Perhaps my understanding of monopoly is incomplete because this makes no sense to me.
pbw 10y ago
What is the solution here? Is google supposed to judge for every snippet whether or not it's beneficial for the wider internet? Seems like they cannot objectively make that call. Should rich snippets be illegal? The article presents a problem, but what is the solution?
- tyingq 10y ago
  Aside from the issue mentioned in the article, there's also the issue of how a rich snippet can appear to be a deliberate endorsement by Google. Because the process is automated, with no checks and balances, some odd stuff gets out there.
- the_duke 10y ago
  I also really dislike that often the source of the information is deliberately obtuse. Even with the Wikipedia snippets, finding the actual link to the article is not quick and easy. Also, what is the goal of rich snippets for Google? Making it quicker and easier to find the information you are looking for? Probably... in part. Reducing the probability that a user actually clicks on a link and keep them right on Google for the next search and ad opportunities? Probably also.
Ono-Sendai 10y ago
What a bunch of bullshit. Google's search engine was far better than it's competitors when it came out, and continues to be. It doesn't (generally) maintain its position through network effects (such as e.g. Facebook does).
- snowpanda 10y ago
  > and continues to be This hasn't been my personal experience, I've been getting better results (the past year or so) with DuckDuckGo.
tyingq 10y ago
Some fun rich snippets that highlight the sort of clumsy approach Google is taking right now: http://imgur.com/a/6EDEP http://imgur.com/a/6EDEP
pg_bot 10y ago
This is the second or third article regarding breaking up the google/facebook ad monopoly that I've read in the past few days. I'm guessing someone has hired a PR firm to push this idea as it feels like I'm being submarined. http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- tyingq 10y ago
  I think it's a legitimate question, and probably should be discussed more anyway. The article misses the bigger issue to me though. Their market share in search, browsers, ad networks, maps, phones, and email creates an opportunity for abuse that's unprecedented. I'm worried about what they could do with all that. We depend quite a bit on their internal culture right now to prevent it. Imagine what a "god mode" app at Google might look like.
- angry-hacker 10y ago
  Or just people on the media are pissed off. They have that leverage anyway over Google to spread their thoughts through media. I personally think Google should be separated or made a dumb pipe, this would be the most American thing ever!
  - bgw 10y ago
    The telecoms need to be made "dumb pipe[s]" in the US before we start worrying about Google.
    - angry-hacker 10y ago
      But Google is bigger than U.S. Globally speaking, they have more influence and power.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >I'm guessing someone has hired a PR firm to push this idea as it feels like I'm being submarined. By this logic, everything that appears more than 3-10 times in the press has possibly been "submarined".
twsted 10y ago
Yesterday I have read another submission [0] on HN, linking to an interesting NYT article "Is It Time to Break Up Google?" [1]. Why has it been flagged? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14174460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14174460 [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/22/opinion/sunday/is-it-time-to-break-up-google.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/22/opinion/sunday/is-it-time...
- Oletros 10y ago
  Perhaps it was flagged because one of the solutions was to get ride of DMCA Safe Harbour. The author has interest in doing that because he is a film producer
maverick_iceman 10y ago
>What gives it roughly 80 percent of the online search traffic is first mover advantage. Back in the mid-'90s[...] Google was just a little bit better than the others This is bullshit. Yahoo! and Altavista were there before Google. And by calling Google's page rank based search algorithm "just a little better than others" the author reveals his own ignorance.
- gozur88 10y ago
  This jumped out at me too. He's using some terms incorrectly in this article. In the very next paragraph he says >Back in the mid-'90s when Sergey Brin and Larry Page started the company, there were many other search tools jostling for position. ... which puts a lie to the sentence you quoted. And then the next point: >Second, what makes Google's search dominance profitable is network effects. Without a large internet to index, and a huge number of people looking for things online, even the best imaginable search would be worthless. That's not what people mean when they talk about network effects. The fact that huge numbers of people use Google doesn't make searching with Google more useful, and Microsoft can also index that "large internet" for Bing.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
5_minutes 10y ago
While I understand the sympathy here for Google's accomplishments, and don't agree with many of the OP's points - just objectively, it's scary for us all to be dependent on one commercial company. Wether they earned to be in that position or not. It's also hard to compare things: the scale of the current internet usage, the type of information that is available. (And what can be influenced by showing what). This scale is much, much wider then what happened to AT&T back in the days. That said, since Apple and MS are also getting away with very similar things, I don't see a point in punishing Google. Especially, as them all being US companies. The solution of breaking up Google and then putting weaker foreign company in the front-seat, by doing so -- also would not make any sense.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
rrggrr 10y ago
Fake news. First the NYT, now The Week, and tomorrow perhaps the Wash Post. Correspondent's dinner is around the corner and much pain is being felt by traditional media. This is Google's competitors crying, whining and hoping to influence public opinion. If you don't like Google's search dominance then build a better engine. Users are happy to migrate for more privacy (DDG), a rich UI (Bing), computational power (Wolphram) ... if the search results great. Google's been hammered by FB in social, by AWS in cloud computing, by Office360 in apps, etc., etc. They're not a monolith.
ma2rten 10y ago
I don't understand why this article got so many upvotes. First, I think the entire premise of the article that Google is not really better than other search engines is wrong. And even if that were true that would not be a case of network effect but just brand advantage. Next, he goes on the say that Google should be regulated, but doesn't say how. I can't really think of a reasonable way that would solve this problem. EDIT: After thinking about this, I came up with an interesting (hypothetical) proposal: Google gets split into two companies. Both companies get access to the Google source code and neither of them is allowed to use the Google brand name for search. This would create competition and solve some of the problems. For instance a website could get delisted by Google A, but still get traffic from Google B. I am not sure if it would be a net positive tough.
Analemma_ 10y ago
There's nothing more frustrating than someone arguing for a position you yourself favor with terrible, easily-knocked-down arguments. I actually do think Google should be regulated, but the author is putting forward the worst possible case. His theories about first mover advantage and network effects are both ridiculous: Google wasn't even the third search engine in existence, and there are little to no network effects in search. They got where they are from quality of product and economy of scale. Ryan Cooper, try rewriting this article from the angle of the effects of Google's monopoly, not the causes. The causes angle is more tempting, because we understand that regulation should be avoided, and so if it must be done we want to feel like the company did something "bad" to "deserve it", but that's a fallacy.
raarts 10y ago
The railroads were nationalized in the 19th century because of their importance to the economy and their unwillingness to standardize. Is that comparable?
Upvoter33 10y ago
alas, dare we say it: more regulation of these essential services is probably going to be needed at some point. Google is generally a good citizen of the world, but if they weren't, they could shape and control the world in many ways. Shouldn't govmt oversight be involved?
nthcolumn 10y ago
And yet we can still read his drivel under the suffocating weight that is google! He complains and says that there really ought to be competition but then gives examples of people simply rehashing results from Google - much like er.. Bing did! I too wish someone would provide some actual competition. I'm sure google would too. I refer the honorable gentleman to my previous answer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14180331 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14180331
ctime 10y ago
Was this person even around back when Google was first started? I recall routinely using 2-3 search engines just find something trivially easy to find in any modern search engine. The others completely sucked (Excite + Altavista + webcrawler + yahoo was my typical cocktail of search engines, for those wondering). The service is and was simply the BEST and it always WORKED. People don't seem to remember days when the internet was far less reliable (and less useful).

aorth 10y ago

> Before rolling it out, Google asked Warner [CelebrityNetWorth.com] if they could scrape his data and credit him. Warner declined, but Google did it anyway. Money quote. Google's rich snippets are friendly to users, but hostile to sites where the data originates.

beaconstudios 10y ago
it's the eternal problem with platform-based companies, like Twitter's treatment of developers. Except in Google's case, the platform is the gateway to the internet.
mattm 10y ago
One could argue that if a "business" is only providing one sentence answers to questions then it's not really a business in the first place. The owner seemed to have found a very small gap and it was closed shortly after.
- tchaffee 10y ago
  Google is profiting off those one sentence answers. If it's enough of a business for Google, I suppose it's enough of a business for the people doing the actual work to find the answers.
  - mcintyre1994 10y ago
    Are they actually though - in the immediate term? Sure they show ads on the search result, but there's a box with the answer to your query, why would you click an ad? It seems like the reason it's good for Google is because it's the perfect response to the query and it cements Google as the search engine that can answer my questions. Are they directly profiting from those queries or are they just making themselves a better search engine, and indirectly profiting from that? If the latter I find it hard to argue against them.
    - tchaffee 10y ago
      If they are stealing the data in order to make themselves a better search engine, I find that pretty easy to argue against. Someone did work that provides value and Google is taking that data and making it look like their own.
      - AznHisoka 10y ago
        Nobody needs to argue anything. just block google in your robots.txt if you are unhappy. case closed.
        tchaffee 10y ago
        What sites need is a happy medium. For Google to index the site, but to not use that same data to eliminate the need for a visit to the site. Content has value. If Google is grabbing that content and using it on their own site, that's a problem.
bgw 10y ago
How are they "hostile to sites where the data originates" when Google is the primary driver of traffic to those sites?
- tyingq 10y ago
  Because they use an algorithm to extract the data that the searcher is looking for and display it on their site, drastically dropping the chances that anyone clicks through to the site. Whether it's hostile or not, if they continue far enough, it would choke off the sources. People don't tend to invest time in creating content where there's zero chance to interact with the reader, ever. Create a site that takes search queries, and return scraped Google results data. Become popular. See how long it takes before it gets shut down. I do get your high level point, but isn't there some quid-pro-quo involved? People allow Google to crawl, which enriches Google's search product. Some traffic is offered in return for helping their index with high quality content. Edit: If you doubt the effects widgets have on traffic, take a look at what it's done to Wikipedia traffic[1]. The KG entries used to have many, many deep links into Wikipedia. A lot of those links have changed to deep links into Google. [1] https://www.searchenginejournal.com/wikipedias-traffic-from-google-down-11-why-the-drop/138791/ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/wikipedias-traffic-from-...
  - narrowrail 10y ago
    My default search work-flow is 5 keystrokes+$searchquery which gives me wikipedia results which are not always good, but 90% exactly what I need. I try to minimize my use of Google's services at every opportunity, and I'm aggressive with my router's host file (not to mention uMatrix w/ Chromium and Firefox w/ NoScript/RequestPolicy). It bothers me that I can't black-hole Google's domains on my router's host file w/o screwing up too many websites to count (local to international) because so many have built-in Google web resource dependencies (e.g. googleapis/maps/googletagmanager). However, I can't believe your argument makes sense to anyone. It seems publisher's want the benefit of Google's traffic w/o having to deal with users preferring not to click-through when they are looking for a 1 sentence answer. There are legit means to preventing Google from indexing one's site.

fear91 10y ago

I'm wondering when, if ever, the general public will start recognizing Google as one of the "big brothers". Somehow it's still perceived as this "cool" startup but they squash small businesses, avoid taxes, are in bed with intelligence agencies, etc.

quickben 10y ago
I'm old enough to remember the techies backlash over targeted advertising in Gmail. It seemed the google's PR started throwing cash at it for years to "educate" the public. The general public appeared to be a complacent herd of sheep like creatures that would embrace convenience over everything. Maybe in your circles Google is "cool". In my circles it's necessary evil. The platform/network effect is so strong there is no escaping it. The US is invested my money wise too deep and won't do what they had the backbone to do with SO and the rest. So, "when, if ever", won't be anytime soon. Meanwhile, innovation suffers. They killed chat protocols interfaces (pure monopoly abuse since they have most users), the buried end-to-end encryption, they killed bunch of competing businesses by promoting their side businesses on the search page higher, etc. Http2 could have had things for the users in it (if one goes through the troubles of upgrading a network layer). Instead it had "cut off download at instant if requested" and other features that made web crawling (though not necessarily browsing and developing) easy. Going forward, they will be cleaning the advertising agency landsccape to get rid out of competition with : Amp ( since they de facto own mobile browsing and Android). Desktop displayed ads (they announced as blocker in chrome, and guess twice whose ads will be allowed through). I can enumerate all day. TLDR: they are out of the 'cool' startup area, and firmly into the deep monopolistic abuse waters.
- PaulHoule 10y ago
  In the 1990s VCs openly stated they would not fund Microsoft competitors. There is a huge hole of companies that never started to compete with Google today, just the VCs don't talk about it today.
  - tyingq 10y ago
    Pretty big moat though, right? What would the minimum investment be to build something, for just search, that was technically just on par with Google?

empath75 10y ago

I don't have a strong opinion about whether or not google should be regulated or not. However, this guy doesn't seem appreciate the scale of the difficulties that google solved and how much better google was than the competition. They almost single-handedly transformed the internet into a useful tool. Altavista and yahoo were like looking up information in a card catalog in comparison. It wasn't just a first mover advantage. And they followed it up by releasing, an ads platform that made everyone else look like amateur hour, a mail product that was far better than hotmail, a mapping tool much better than MapQuest, and a web browser that was far better than ie or Firefox. They are in the position they're in because they solved a lot of difficult problems and made it look easy. If we ever get to the point that we need as a society to rein them in, we should do it with a full understanding of what they've accomplished. It's bizarre to accuse the company that made the internet into what it is today of somehow crushing it.

wazoox 10y ago
Basically you're explaining that they earned a monopoly for a reason. That's true. And there are always true advantages to monopoly (standardization, economy of scale, prices stability ...). However monopolies harm the economy and the public good in the long run. See, that works for any past monopoly: I don't have a strong opinion about whether or not Microsoft should be regulated or not. [...] It's bizarre to accuse the company that made the PC into what it is today of somehow crushing it. I don't have a strong opinion about whether or not AT&T should be regulated or not. [...] It's bizarre to accuse the company that made the telephone into what it is today of somehow crushing it. I don't have a strong opinion about whether or not Standard Oil should be regulated or not. [...] It's bizarre to accuse the company that made the oil industry into what it is today of somehow crushing it.
- bgw 10y ago
  It has always been strange for me to understand Google search as a monopoly. First, there are competitors. Second, it's free (yes, I know you pay with data). Third, you can use the internet without using any of Google's services (except adsense, I suppose). How is Google's search a monopoly when it's the user who is deciding they prefer it to Bing or Duck Duck Go or Yahoo? Perhaps my understanding of monopoly is incomplete because this makes no sense to me.

pbw 10y ago

What is the solution here? Is google supposed to judge for every snippet whether or not it's beneficial for the wider internet? Seems like they cannot objectively make that call. Should rich snippets be illegal? The article presents a problem, but what is the solution?

tyingq 10y ago
Aside from the issue mentioned in the article, there's also the issue of how a rich snippet can appear to be a deliberate endorsement by Google. Because the process is automated, with no checks and balances, some odd stuff gets out there.
the_duke 10y ago
I also really dislike that often the source of the information is deliberately obtuse. Even with the Wikipedia snippets, finding the actual link to the article is not quick and easy. Also, what is the goal of rich snippets for Google? Making it quicker and easier to find the information you are looking for? Probably... in part. Reducing the probability that a user actually clicks on a link and keep them right on Google for the next search and ad opportunities? Probably also.

Ono-Sendai 10y ago

What a bunch of bullshit. Google's search engine was far better than it's competitors when it came out, and continues to be. It doesn't (generally) maintain its position through network effects (such as e.g. Facebook does).

snowpanda 10y ago
> and continues to be This hasn't been my personal experience, I've been getting better results (the past year or so) with DuckDuckGo.

tyingq 10y ago

Some fun rich snippets that highlight the sort of clumsy approach Google is taking right now: http://imgur.com/a/6EDEP http://imgur.com/a/6EDEP

pg_bot 10y ago

This is the second or third article regarding breaking up the google/facebook ad monopoly that I've read in the past few days. I'm guessing someone has hired a PR firm to push this idea as it feels like I'm being submarined. http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

tyingq 10y ago
I think it's a legitimate question, and probably should be discussed more anyway. The article misses the bigger issue to me though. Their market share in search, browsers, ad networks, maps, phones, and email creates an opportunity for abuse that's unprecedented. I'm worried about what they could do with all that. We depend quite a bit on their internal culture right now to prevent it. Imagine what a "god mode" app at Google might look like.
angry-hacker 10y ago
Or just people on the media are pissed off. They have that leverage anyway over Google to spread their thoughts through media. I personally think Google should be separated or made a dumb pipe, this would be the most American thing ever!
- bgw 10y ago
  The telecoms need to be made "dumb pipe[s]" in the US before we start worrying about Google.
  - angry-hacker 10y ago
    But Google is bigger than U.S. Globally speaking, they have more influence and power.
coldtea 10y ago
>I'm guessing someone has hired a PR firm to push this idea as it feels like I'm being submarined. By this logic, everything that appears more than 3-10 times in the press has possibly been "submarined".

twsted 10y ago

Yesterday I have read another submission [0] on HN, linking to an interesting NYT article "Is It Time to Break Up Google?" [1]. Why has it been flagged? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14174460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14174460 [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/22/opinion/sunday/is-it-time-to-break-up-google.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/22/opinion/sunday/is-it-time...

Oletros 10y ago
Perhaps it was flagged because one of the solutions was to get ride of DMCA Safe Harbour. The author has interest in doing that because he is a film producer

maverick_iceman 10y ago

>What gives it roughly 80 percent of the online search traffic is first mover advantage. Back in the mid-'90s[...] Google was just a little bit better than the others This is bullshit. Yahoo! and Altavista were there before Google. And by calling Google's page rank based search algorithm "just a little better than others" the author reveals his own ignorance.

gozur88 10y ago
This jumped out at me too. He's using some terms incorrectly in this article. In the very next paragraph he says >Back in the mid-'90s when Sergey Brin and Larry Page started the company, there were many other search tools jostling for position. ... which puts a lie to the sentence you quoted. And then the next point: >Second, what makes Google's search dominance profitable is network effects. Without a large internet to index, and a huge number of people looking for things online, even the best imaginable search would be worthless. That's not what people mean when they talk about network effects. The fact that huge numbers of people use Google doesn't make searching with Google more useful, and Microsoft can also index that "large internet" for Bing.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

5_minutes 10y ago

While I understand the sympathy here for Google's accomplishments, and don't agree with many of the OP's points - just objectively, it's scary for us all to be dependent on one commercial company. Wether they earned to be in that position or not. It's also hard to compare things: the scale of the current internet usage, the type of information that is available. (And what can be influenced by showing what). This scale is much, much wider then what happened to AT&T back in the days. That said, since Apple and MS are also getting away with very similar things, I don't see a point in punishing Google. Especially, as them all being US companies. The solution of breaking up Google and then putting weaker foreign company in the front-seat, by doing so -- also would not make any sense.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

rrggrr 10y ago

Fake news. First the NYT, now The Week, and tomorrow perhaps the Wash Post. Correspondent's dinner is around the corner and much pain is being felt by traditional media. This is Google's competitors crying, whining and hoping to influence public opinion. If you don't like Google's search dominance then build a better engine. Users are happy to migrate for more privacy (DDG), a rich UI (Bing), computational power (Wolphram) ... if the search results great. Google's been hammered by FB in social, by AWS in cloud computing, by Office360 in apps, etc., etc. They're not a monolith.

ma2rten 10y ago

I don't understand why this article got so many upvotes. First, I think the entire premise of the article that Google is not really better than other search engines is wrong. And even if that were true that would not be a case of network effect but just brand advantage. Next, he goes on the say that Google should be regulated, but doesn't say how. I can't really think of a reasonable way that would solve this problem. EDIT: After thinking about this, I came up with an interesting (hypothetical) proposal: Google gets split into two companies. Both companies get access to the Google source code and neither of them is allowed to use the Google brand name for search. This would create competition and solve some of the problems. For instance a website could get delisted by Google A, but still get traffic from Google B. I am not sure if it would be a net positive tough.

Analemma_ 10y ago

There's nothing more frustrating than someone arguing for a position you yourself favor with terrible, easily-knocked-down arguments. I actually do think Google should be regulated, but the author is putting forward the worst possible case. His theories about first mover advantage and network effects are both ridiculous: Google wasn't even the third search engine in existence, and there are little to no network effects in search. They got where they are from quality of product and economy of scale. Ryan Cooper, try rewriting this article from the angle of the effects of Google's monopoly, not the causes. The causes angle is more tempting, because we understand that regulation should be avoided, and so if it must be done we want to feel like the company did something "bad" to "deserve it", but that's a fallacy.

raarts 10y ago

The railroads were nationalized in the 19th century because of their importance to the economy and their unwillingness to standardize. Is that comparable?

Upvoter33 10y ago

alas, dare we say it: more regulation of these essential services is probably going to be needed at some point. Google is generally a good citizen of the world, but if they weren't, they could shape and control the world in many ways. Shouldn't govmt oversight be involved?

nthcolumn 10y ago

And yet we can still read his drivel under the suffocating weight that is google! He complains and says that there really ought to be competition but then gives examples of people simply rehashing results from Google - much like er.. Bing did! I too wish someone would provide some actual competition. I'm sure google would too. I refer the honorable gentleman to my previous answer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14180331 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14180331

ctime 10y ago

Was this person even around back when Google was first started? I recall routinely using 2-3 search engines just find something trivially easy to find in any modern search engine. The others completely sucked (Excite + Altavista + webcrawler + yahoo was my typical cocktail of search engines, for those wondering). The service is and was simply the BEST and it always WORKED. People don't seem to remember days when the internet was far less reliable (and less useful).