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Yes Google spams search results with ads. But instead of using a different search engine such as duckduckgo.com, we're calling for the government to break up Go

Yes Google spams search results with ads. But instead of using a different search engine such as duckduckgo.com, we're calling for the government to break up Google? That's plain ridiculous. I'm not opposed to breaking up oligopolies, but calling for the government to fix this particular issue is like asking to be put under legal guardianship.

rmsaksida 7y ago
Yeah, I don't see how breaking up them up would fix this. Let's say there's a dedicated company called "Google Search". Why wouldn't Google Search, the search engine company, spam search results with ads? Breaking up a company is one thing, dictating how a company should operate is another. I think what DHH has in mind is a search company that operates more like an utility, but that's not necessarily what we would get if Google were broken up.
- foobarian 7y ago
  I don't object that much to a search engine spamming results with ads if they really wish to. What I do object to is them using search to gain market knowledge to discover high margin opportunities and build them into the search engine, promoting them ahead of the 3rd parties.
  - lallysingh 7y ago
    .. but they haven't. Gmail and docs any fed from search, Android isn't related, and their other stuff hasn't really taken off. Edited for qualification.
    - isolli 7y ago
      But they have. They were fined $2.7bn for abusing their position to drive people to their own shopping service. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/27/534524024/google-hit-with-2-7-billion-fine-by-european-antitrust-monitor https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/27/534524024...
    - frei 7y ago
      GP is talking about the Google onebox features, like maps, local reviews, weather, sports updates, movie tickets, etc. which show up on the SRP before competitors like MapQuest/ESPN/AccuWeather/Fandango
  - wolco 7y ago
    Breaking them up would see them selling this data to themselves.
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  > Why wouldn't Google Search, the search engine company, spam search results with ads? Nothing is stopping them. But they wouldn't have the monopoly on ads to cover them if their results are of bad quality.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    Almost no one of note thinks Google search result are bad quality in a market sense. That's why almost everyone chooses to use Google search. People who think Google search is bad are upset that other people like Google search results.
    - judge2020 7y ago
      No, in certain use cases the search engine can fall behind. It's not going to be the best at everything. And when thinking about certain other issues (privacy, not showing the full URL, etc) it is perfectly valid to not use Google.
  - hanniabu 7y ago
    > But they wouldn't have the monopoly on ads I'm not seeing how anything would change. Google search and whatever other google branches will continue working together so it'll essentially be the same thing but with a different legal structure to appease everyone.
  - kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
    Do a google search for "computer". The entire first page is ads save for the one Wikipedia link.
    - wolco 7y ago
      I have a college..
    - marcosdumay 7y ago
      Honestly, I don't think the Google results are currently of bad quality. A search for "computer" is mostly meaningless, and they could reasonably fill it with anything. It is also not as absurdelly far ahead of anybody else as it used to be. I mostly avoid it, but that's because I mostly avoid any Google service. All of them are bundled and I don't want some AI misstep to lock me out of the few of their services I care about. At this point some forced unbundling would bring a huge trust benefit to Google. But anyway, it is very clear that the bundling of Google's monopolies on ads and search are a huge barrier to innovation and competition on both of those.
bananamerica 7y ago
Policies must work in the real world, not in the world of our dreams and fantasies. And in this world Google has an actual monopoly that won’t be broken without government intervention.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Monopoly on what? Search, or ads?
  - spookthesunset 7y ago
    And people downvote you, which is silly. What, exactly, does google have a monopoly on? People use their products because they are good, not because they have to. Anybody could cone along with better mail, maps, or search and people would have little trouble switching (okay mail might be tricky).
- fauigerzigerk 7y ago
  I have chosen my words very carefully exactly because I did not want to say that government action against Google is not merited for any reason. But calling for government action just because people can't be bothered to use a different search engine that is just a click away discredits all valid criticism of Google's dominant market position.
- jedimastert 7y ago
  > And in this world Google has an actual monopoly that won’t be broken without government intervention. On what? I genuinely don't see what people think google has a "monopoly" on. It's definitely the biggest player in search and ads, but it's nowhere near the only company. I wouldn't even call them "overly dominant"
  - BlueTemplar 7y ago
    Google, not "overtly dominant" in its Search, Maps and YouTube services?!? (Also Android, going by market share rather than worth.)
0xBA5ED 7y ago
>But instead of using a different search engine such as duckduckgo.com, we're calling for the government to break up Google? Without saying whether or not I think they should be "broken up", there's much more to consider than their search engine.
- fauigerzigerk 7y ago
  I agree completely. That's why I said "to fix this particular issue". There are other situations (including some involving Google) where freedom of choice is indeed severely limited by an oligopolistic market structure.
bad_user 7y ago
I'm a DDG user. Unfortunately it's only a temporary solution. For one maintaining your own web crawler and index is expensive, DDG is outsourcing that to Bing. They use other sources too, but if Bing shuts down their API tomorrow, DDG will probably die. DDG's revenue also comes from ads. They might claim that they want to do right by users, but when serving ads the incentive is to optimize those ads to make more money. Also DDG's work isn't AFAIK open source. But it probably wouldn't help anyway, it's not like you could install a search engine on your own VPS. I don't think breaking Google is the answer either. What the US government should do is to introduce privacy laws that disallows user profiling for the purpose of serving ads. The GDPR in the EU is a step in the right direction. The US government should also demand for those ads to be more clearly marked as being ads via color clues.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  DDG doesn't use user profiling to serve ads.
- fauigerzigerk 7y ago
  You're making good points. I just think that whatever the funding trade-offs of search engines may be, there cannot be a solution that doesn't also rely on users discriminating based on usability. If users choose Google today, it's either because of inertia or because they find that Google's organic search results are worth sifting through a page of ads. This is unlike other aspects like privacy where users may not fully understand the consequences of their actions.
- djsumdog 7y ago
  I thought they purchased indexs off of Yandex to get started? Surely they must also maintain their own crawlers and indexes as well now.
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  Any historical examples of monopolies that have not been abused?
- afiori 7y ago
  > DDG's revenue also comes from ads. They might claim that they want to do right by users, but when serving ads the incentive is to optimize those ads to make more money. I find this a red herring. Ads have never been a problem, the ecosystem around them is the problem. > What the US government should do is to introduce privacy laws that disallows user profiling for the purpose of serving ads. The GDPR in the EU is a step in the right direction. This is overly specific; user profiling is also used in recommendations and to develop aggressive and optimized marketing strategies. One of the problem of "Big Tech surveillance" in not what they know about you, but that they know so much about everyone that they can model your behavior/response with little information. (which for example is what happened with Cambridge Analytica) > The US government should also demand for those ads to be more clearly marked as being ads via color clues. This feel a lot like micromanaging.
Alex3917 7y ago
When people call for Google to be broken up they're not talking about splitting the search engine in half, they're talking about splitting the search engine from Gmail, YouTube, Maps, and AdWords.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Maps is a search engine.
- scarface74 7y ago
  Neither Gmail nor Maps is anything close to a “monopoly” in the US. You can get email from plenty of places and Apple has about a 40% market share in the US - with its own maps.
  - feanaro 7y ago
    Can you use Apple maps without owning Apple hardware? If not, then it doesn't count. If yes, then that's good news I wasn't aware of.
    - jraph 7y ago
      I don't know whether this is good news¹, but DuckDuckGo uses Apple maps for location searches, so you can use Apple maps through Duck Duck Go. 1: because it replaced OSM…
    - scarface74 7y ago
      No, but if we go as far as “Google has a monopoly on its own platform”, that’s an ugly rabbit hole. But you can use third party Map apps on Android from Nokia and other providers. No one forces you to stay on Android.
- spookthesunset 7y ago
  What benefit would that provide? They’d all still be the dominant player in their market. And how would splitting off AdWords be good for the consumer? Do you like paying for your search engine, Gmail, maps, and more?
agumonkey 7y ago
Recently I caught myself using bing.. it felt a tad lighter and slightly different from Google. An intermediate between G and ddg.
- gtfratteus 7y ago
  Microsoft is an even larger and more powerful company than Google, which seems to be the only real complaint anybody has about Google in here. I'm not sure how switching to Bing solves the perceived problems of people in this thread.
breck 7y ago
Agreed. There’s a better way to have more competition: end artificial intellectual monopoly laws. To compete against Google you need a small moon of licensed information. If all public information was public domain, many people could build great competitors relatively quickly.
nabla9 7y ago
Google being big search engine is not as big problem as their use of their money and position to leverage into other areas. By all means allow Google to be a dominant search engine, but force them to sell stuff that is not their core business, like YouTube, Gmail, Drive, Android, G Suite ... Facebook should be forced to sell Instagram.
- scarface74 7y ago
  YouTube - barely profitable Android - it came out in the Oracle case that Android has only made Google about $24 billion in profit from the time of its inception until the beginning of the trial. They have given Apple more money to be the default search engine on iOS than they have made on Android. Gmail - mail hosts are a dime a dozen. It’s a feature not a product. Google drive - again a feature not a product. DropBox has lost money since it’s inception and MS gives away 6TB of storage with Office365 ($100/year) GSuite - not exactly a “monopoly” it’s a distant second to Microsoft. Office software with the limited capabilities of GSuite is a commodity. Apple gives iWorks away.
  - nabla9 7y ago
    You realize that all your arguments are signals of monopoly power. They are all part of the ad selling business.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      Apple is in every single segment that Google is in and Microsoft is in most of them. Should we say that any company that has a product in one category shouldn’t be allowed to branch out? Should Apple have been forced to keep selling iPods knowing that the phone would eventually kill their business? Should Microsoft and Google not been allowed to offer cloud services?
waydowntogo 7y ago
Duckduckgo did a lot of progress in last 2-3 years. When I began using it DDG had bad results but results are much closer to google's results today.
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  DDG doesn't do its own search though...
johannes1234321 7y ago
Many of those people who want to break up Google are not looking at it from the user perspective, but as a company running some website. As a site owner you have the problem that people searching for you are using Google and your site will only come up below adds for your competitor. Even when searching for your company name. Thus unless you pay a "Google Tax" (paying for ads) many people won't find you. In some cases even Google themselves will add features to compete with your service (flight booking is a relatively recent example) If splitting up will solve that is questionable to me, though. The search has to be financed and unless we make it some base service paid by tax or similar they need a revenue service and ads is the only which seems to be working. From a "civil rights" perspective to me it is also clear that Google has too much influence and power. But still fail to see a good way to regulate that.
- fauigerzigerk 7y ago
  I completely agree that there are many problematic aspects of Google's dominant market position. So let's not call for a breakup to fix something a breakup can't fix and for reasons that are so obiously bad that they can be used to discredit more serious criticism of Google's dominance.
  - calcifer 7y ago
    > something a breakup can't fix Really? Breaking up the search unit and the ads unit into separate companies would solve that problem, no?
    - johannes1234321 7y ago
      The question is whether there is a sustainable business for doing search, but not ads. An option might be that the search provider can license the search results to different companies putting their individual ads on topmofnthe results. Then different sites could compete for the the best dispaly and usability. Similar to the way elictricity grids are split from providers or railway tracks are split from train operators in many European countries. Issue of course is that with electrical grids and rail networks are a "solved" issue with little innovation. In the search market there is still lots of room for improvement and constant need to adapt to spamers.
jdjdjjsjs 7y ago
Maybe because those who are asking for it to be broken up are not asking for it to be broken up to solve the problem that it is peppered with ads? Maybe they have other different concerns that they think will best be resolved by breaking them up?
netcan 7y ago
People like principles, and classifications. Monopoly abuse, surveillance capitalism, ad engine... All extra loaded with implications. I think to get anywhere, we have to avoid rather than seek these. Digital monopolies are not telecoms or railroads. Policy by analogy is a bad idea. DHH makes two kinda unrelated claims/observations. One is that Google is spamming, and that this is a sign of monopoly. Like you, I think this is a pretty weak case. Second, is "pay-to-play." If Basecamp don't buy ads, basecamp's competition will outrank them in search results. Users search "dominos." Google suggests "pizza hut" unless dominos pay. A lot of "advertisers" running campaigns just for their brand name. This seems rotten, by the very weak, very unestablished conventions of the internet. There are monopol-ish issues with big techcos across lots of areas (1) EU Case: adwords controls most search ads. Google's search competitors are on unequal terms there. (2) Free speech on social media. FB & Twitter's adhoc policies are becoming the de facto free speech laws. (3) biggest-dataset-wins feedback loops. All these have sheer size at their core.
solso 7y ago
When the monopoly is strong as Google is, with market shares around 90%, and they use 20-30% of their revenue for 'user acquisition' (they pay to be default in any platforms: from Apple, to Samsung, to Telcos, etc.) Basically they suck all the oxygen out of the room so that no-one can fight them. One would have to spend almost as much as Google, if not more, on user-acquisition. Unlikely to happen. Regulation is the only way to even the field a bit. DDG, Startpage and such, on the current instantiation, they are proxies to someone else search-backend. Does it serve for you (or anyone) to avoid using Google (directly)? Yes, of course, and that's actually great. Do they fix the underlying problem? No. Not unless a) they are building an independent/autonomous backend, and b) they get so much money that they can challenge Google on the user acquisition.
- jldugger 7y ago
  > One would have to spend almost as much as Google, if not more, on user-acquisition. Why is that a problem? Wouldn't decreased profitability be the sign of increased competition?
  - solso 7y ago
    That's not a problem per se, it's just unlikely to happen because of the insane amount of the bill, and the roi is not that good anyway. For instance, Google pays Apple 9 billion/year to be the default search engine (incredible but True). On the account of 20-30% to user acquisition that means that Apple users can be monetized by Google at around 30B/year (9B/0.30). Google is extremely good at monetizing people, right, a competitor might not be as efficient, let's say half. That gives you 15B addressable revenue. Now the question. Would you pay Apple 10B to gain, at best, 15B? No one that crazy has this kind of money :-) On top of that, who prevents Google to pay 16B next year?
    - jldugger 7y ago
      > Would you pay Apple 10B to gain, at best, 15B? 30% APY Seems like a good deal to me! EDIT: more seriously, you don't start with iPhone. You start outbidding Google on the margins where your budget constraint less a factor. > On top of that, who prevents Google to pay 16B next year? Profit margins. Google's budget is not unlimited, after all.
ehnto 7y ago
I don't think it's that black and white. It's clear that they have enormous influence in the general population, and the amount of people who care about this kind of thing enough to switch to a different search engine are not enough to change that influence. Remember Microsoft once had an antitrust brought against it for shipping IE with their OS. Imagine now, shipping a phone to millions, with your browser that defaults every text input to a search string directly into your ad network.
RivieraKid 7y ago
Government intervention is the correct approach to dealing with monopolies when the market alone hasn't been able to do it, which is the case here. The only question is how. Maybe Google should be forced to limit the amount of ads they are showing.
earthboundkid 7y ago
AMP is exhibit A of why Google must be broken up. They have multiple monopolies (search, ads) which they use to reinforce each other. No one wants to make yet another version of their website using a completely different set of ads and analytics, but if that's what it takes to get better SEO, media companies will do it. It's an attack on the open web.
stingraycharles 7y ago
The network effect of an organization like Google is not to be underestimated: Google has many complementing services that all funnel you to their search engine. Because of this, other search engines are at a serious disadvantage if they want to compete. Also considering that search is very much a “winner takes all” market, where more users mean better results. These type of situations are typically bad for consumers, and there is very much a role for the government to steer the status quo away from this and support Google’s competitors. Whether that’s done by breaking up Google, taxing them more heavily, or something else is up for discussion. But simply telling people “just use DDG!” and considering that a viable solution to the problem is insufficient.
- ttoinou 7y ago
  Then we need another company to provide the same service. I disagree with "These type of situations are typically bad for consumers" : this exact situation happened because Google was good for consumers
tomtomtom777 7y ago
Maybe forcefully breaking them up is to much, but let's not pretend that breaking them up is acting against free market principles. Oligopolies like this exist because there is no free market. Government laws on things like intellectual property, profit taxes and most importantly, the limited liability of corporations are the necessary breading ground for organization into giants. In a pre-corporate "Adam Smith" style free market Google could not exist. In a sense, these giants are the opposite of a free market as every movement of value within large corporations is governed by hierarchical decision making with an almost military scheme. From this perspective, it isn't all that strange for governments to look into rules and regulations that can tame the beasts that they have created with their rules and regulations.
paulcole 7y ago
> Google spams search results with ads For god’s sake, it’s literally their business. It’s not spamming anymore than NBC showing ads during The Voice is spamming. You get something for no out of pocket cost and in exchange you are going to be shown ads.
headelf 7y ago
Isn't that what the government does– protects us from ourselves?
freediver 7y ago
> Yes Google spams search results with ads. But instead of using a different search engine such as duckduckgo.com, we're calling for the government to break up Google? your alternative suggestion is flawed. ddg shows ads too. actually it shows the same number of ads and roughly in the same manner as google did when it was the same size as ddg today. the real problem is ad-driven business model which makes all search engines (google, ddg, startpage) advertising companies first. you are what you sell.
aiphex 7y ago
Duckduckgo needs to change their name. I swear that's what's held them back.
lwhi 7y ago
The system we work within affects the way our society behaves, because free-market capitalism has failed us.
- lwhi 7y ago
  Okay ... I'll qualify that. The system has created vast inequalities of wealth, monopolisation by corporate structures that are too large to fail and helped to create and sustain a climate emergency that will change the face of life on the planet irreparably.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
drieddust 7y ago
What happens when replacement becomes big and starts behaving like new Google?

rmsaksida 7y ago

Yeah, I don't see how breaking up them up would fix this. Let's say there's a dedicated company called "Google Search". Why wouldn't Google Search, the search engine company, spam search results with ads? Breaking up a company is one thing, dictating how a company should operate is another. I think what DHH has in mind is a search company that operates more like an utility, but that's not necessarily what we would get if Google were broken up.

foobarian 7y ago
I don't object that much to a search engine spamming results with ads if they really wish to. What I do object to is them using search to gain market knowledge to discover high margin opportunities and build them into the search engine, promoting them ahead of the 3rd parties.
- lallysingh 7y ago
  .. but they haven't. Gmail and docs any fed from search, Android isn't related, and their other stuff hasn't really taken off. Edited for qualification.
  - isolli 7y ago
    But they have. They were fined $2.7bn for abusing their position to drive people to their own shopping service. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/27/534524024/google-hit-with-2-7-billion-fine-by-european-antitrust-monitor https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/27/534524024...
  - frei 7y ago
    GP is talking about the Google onebox features, like maps, local reviews, weather, sports updates, movie tickets, etc. which show up on the SRP before competitors like MapQuest/ESPN/AccuWeather/Fandango
- wolco 7y ago
  Breaking them up would see them selling this data to themselves.
marcosdumay 7y ago
> Why wouldn't Google Search, the search engine company, spam search results with ads? Nothing is stopping them. But they wouldn't have the monopoly on ads to cover them if their results are of bad quality.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Almost no one of note thinks Google search result are bad quality in a market sense. That's why almost everyone chooses to use Google search. People who think Google search is bad are upset that other people like Google search results.
  - judge2020 7y ago
    No, in certain use cases the search engine can fall behind. It's not going to be the best at everything. And when thinking about certain other issues (privacy, not showing the full URL, etc) it is perfectly valid to not use Google.
- hanniabu 7y ago
  > But they wouldn't have the monopoly on ads I'm not seeing how anything would change. Google search and whatever other google branches will continue working together so it'll essentially be the same thing but with a different legal structure to appease everyone.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  Do a google search for "computer". The entire first page is ads save for the one Wikipedia link.
  - wolco 7y ago
    I have a college..
  - marcosdumay 7y ago
    Honestly, I don't think the Google results are currently of bad quality. A search for "computer" is mostly meaningless, and they could reasonably fill it with anything. It is also not as absurdelly far ahead of anybody else as it used to be. I mostly avoid it, but that's because I mostly avoid any Google service. All of them are bundled and I don't want some AI misstep to lock me out of the few of their services I care about. At this point some forced unbundling would bring a huge trust benefit to Google. But anyway, it is very clear that the bundling of Google's monopolies on ads and search are a huge barrier to innovation and competition on both of those.

bananamerica 7y ago

Policies must work in the real world, not in the world of our dreams and fantasies. And in this world Google has an actual monopoly that won’t be broken without government intervention.

lonelappde 7y ago
Monopoly on what? Search, or ads?
- spookthesunset 7y ago
  And people downvote you, which is silly. What, exactly, does google have a monopoly on? People use their products because they are good, not because they have to. Anybody could cone along with better mail, maps, or search and people would have little trouble switching (okay mail might be tricky).
fauigerzigerk 7y ago
I have chosen my words very carefully exactly because I did not want to say that government action against Google is not merited for any reason. But calling for government action just because people can't be bothered to use a different search engine that is just a click away discredits all valid criticism of Google's dominant market position.
jedimastert 7y ago
> And in this world Google has an actual monopoly that won’t be broken without government intervention. On what? I genuinely don't see what people think google has a "monopoly" on. It's definitely the biggest player in search and ads, but it's nowhere near the only company. I wouldn't even call them "overly dominant"
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  Google, not "overtly dominant" in its Search, Maps and YouTube services?!? (Also Android, going by market share rather than worth.)

0xBA5ED 7y ago

>But instead of using a different search engine such as duckduckgo.com, we're calling for the government to break up Google? Without saying whether or not I think they should be "broken up", there's much more to consider than their search engine.

fauigerzigerk 7y ago
I agree completely. That's why I said "to fix this particular issue". There are other situations (including some involving Google) where freedom of choice is indeed severely limited by an oligopolistic market structure.

bad_user 7y ago

I'm a DDG user. Unfortunately it's only a temporary solution. For one maintaining your own web crawler and index is expensive, DDG is outsourcing that to Bing. They use other sources too, but if Bing shuts down their API tomorrow, DDG will probably die. DDG's revenue also comes from ads. They might claim that they want to do right by users, but when serving ads the incentive is to optimize those ads to make more money. Also DDG's work isn't AFAIK open source. But it probably wouldn't help anyway, it's not like you could install a search engine on your own VPS. I don't think breaking Google is the answer either. What the US government should do is to introduce privacy laws that disallows user profiling for the purpose of serving ads. The GDPR in the EU is a step in the right direction. The US government should also demand for those ads to be more clearly marked as being ads via color clues.

lonelappde 7y ago
DDG doesn't use user profiling to serve ads.
fauigerzigerk 7y ago
You're making good points. I just think that whatever the funding trade-offs of search engines may be, there cannot be a solution that doesn't also rely on users discriminating based on usability. If users choose Google today, it's either because of inertia or because they find that Google's organic search results are worth sifting through a page of ads. This is unlike other aspects like privacy where users may not fully understand the consequences of their actions.
djsumdog 7y ago
I thought they purchased indexs off of Yandex to get started? Surely they must also maintain their own crawlers and indexes as well now.
BlueTemplar 7y ago
Any historical examples of monopolies that have not been abused?
afiori 7y ago
> DDG's revenue also comes from ads. They might claim that they want to do right by users, but when serving ads the incentive is to optimize those ads to make more money. I find this a red herring. Ads have never been a problem, the ecosystem around them is the problem. > What the US government should do is to introduce privacy laws that disallows user profiling for the purpose of serving ads. The GDPR in the EU is a step in the right direction. This is overly specific; user profiling is also used in recommendations and to develop aggressive and optimized marketing strategies. One of the problem of "Big Tech surveillance" in not what they know about you, but that they know so much about everyone that they can model your behavior/response with little information. (which for example is what happened with Cambridge Analytica) > The US government should also demand for those ads to be more clearly marked as being ads via color clues. This feel a lot like micromanaging.

Alex3917 7y ago

When people call for Google to be broken up they're not talking about splitting the search engine in half, they're talking about splitting the search engine from Gmail, YouTube, Maps, and AdWords.

lonelappde 7y ago
Maps is a search engine.
scarface74 7y ago
Neither Gmail nor Maps is anything close to a “monopoly” in the US. You can get email from plenty of places and Apple has about a 40% market share in the US - with its own maps.
- feanaro 7y ago
  Can you use Apple maps without owning Apple hardware? If not, then it doesn't count. If yes, then that's good news I wasn't aware of.
  - jraph 7y ago
    I don't know whether this is good news¹, but DuckDuckGo uses Apple maps for location searches, so you can use Apple maps through Duck Duck Go. 1: because it replaced OSM…
  - scarface74 7y ago
    No, but if we go as far as “Google has a monopoly on its own platform”, that’s an ugly rabbit hole. But you can use third party Map apps on Android from Nokia and other providers. No one forces you to stay on Android.
spookthesunset 7y ago
What benefit would that provide? They’d all still be the dominant player in their market. And how would splitting off AdWords be good for the consumer? Do you like paying for your search engine, Gmail, maps, and more?

agumonkey 7y ago

Recently I caught myself using bing.. it felt a tad lighter and slightly different from Google. An intermediate between G and ddg.

gtfratteus 7y ago
Microsoft is an even larger and more powerful company than Google, which seems to be the only real complaint anybody has about Google in here. I'm not sure how switching to Bing solves the perceived problems of people in this thread.

breck 7y ago

Agreed. There’s a better way to have more competition: end artificial intellectual monopoly laws. To compete against Google you need a small moon of licensed information. If all public information was public domain, many people could build great competitors relatively quickly.

nabla9 7y ago

Google being big search engine is not as big problem as their use of their money and position to leverage into other areas. By all means allow Google to be a dominant search engine, but force them to sell stuff that is not their core business, like YouTube, Gmail, Drive, Android, G Suite ... Facebook should be forced to sell Instagram.

scarface74 7y ago
YouTube - barely profitable Android - it came out in the Oracle case that Android has only made Google about $24 billion in profit from the time of its inception until the beginning of the trial. They have given Apple more money to be the default search engine on iOS than they have made on Android. Gmail - mail hosts are a dime a dozen. It’s a feature not a product. Google drive - again a feature not a product. DropBox has lost money since it’s inception and MS gives away 6TB of storage with Office365 ($100/year) GSuite - not exactly a “monopoly” it’s a distant second to Microsoft. Office software with the limited capabilities of GSuite is a commodity. Apple gives iWorks away.
- nabla9 7y ago
  You realize that all your arguments are signals of monopoly power. They are all part of the ad selling business.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Apple is in every single segment that Google is in and Microsoft is in most of them. Should we say that any company that has a product in one category shouldn’t be allowed to branch out? Should Apple have been forced to keep selling iPods knowing that the phone would eventually kill their business? Should Microsoft and Google not been allowed to offer cloud services?

waydowntogo 7y ago

Duckduckgo did a lot of progress in last 2-3 years. When I began using it DDG had bad results but results are much closer to google's results today.

BlueTemplar 7y ago
DDG doesn't do its own search though...

johannes1234321 7y ago

Many of those people who want to break up Google are not looking at it from the user perspective, but as a company running some website. As a site owner you have the problem that people searching for you are using Google and your site will only come up below adds for your competitor. Even when searching for your company name. Thus unless you pay a "Google Tax" (paying for ads) many people won't find you. In some cases even Google themselves will add features to compete with your service (flight booking is a relatively recent example) If splitting up will solve that is questionable to me, though. The search has to be financed and unless we make it some base service paid by tax or similar they need a revenue service and ads is the only which seems to be working. From a "civil rights" perspective to me it is also clear that Google has too much influence and power. But still fail to see a good way to regulate that.

fauigerzigerk 7y ago
I completely agree that there are many problematic aspects of Google's dominant market position. So let's not call for a breakup to fix something a breakup can't fix and for reasons that are so obiously bad that they can be used to discredit more serious criticism of Google's dominance.
- calcifer 7y ago
  > something a breakup can't fix Really? Breaking up the search unit and the ads unit into separate companies would solve that problem, no?
  - johannes1234321 7y ago
    The question is whether there is a sustainable business for doing search, but not ads. An option might be that the search provider can license the search results to different companies putting their individual ads on topmofnthe results. Then different sites could compete for the the best dispaly and usability. Similar to the way elictricity grids are split from providers or railway tracks are split from train operators in many European countries. Issue of course is that with electrical grids and rail networks are a "solved" issue with little innovation. In the search market there is still lots of room for improvement and constant need to adapt to spamers.

jdjdjjsjs 7y ago

Maybe because those who are asking for it to be broken up are not asking for it to be broken up to solve the problem that it is peppered with ads? Maybe they have other different concerns that they think will best be resolved by breaking them up?

netcan 7y ago

People like principles, and classifications. Monopoly abuse, surveillance capitalism, ad engine... All extra loaded with implications. I think to get anywhere, we have to avoid rather than seek these. Digital monopolies are not telecoms or railroads. Policy by analogy is a bad idea. DHH makes two kinda unrelated claims/observations. One is that Google is spamming, and that this is a sign of monopoly. Like you, I think this is a pretty weak case. Second, is "pay-to-play." If Basecamp don't buy ads, basecamp's competition will outrank them in search results. Users search "dominos." Google suggests "pizza hut" unless dominos pay. A lot of "advertisers" running campaigns just for their brand name. This seems rotten, by the very weak, very unestablished conventions of the internet. There are monopol-ish issues with big techcos across lots of areas (1) EU Case: adwords controls most search ads. Google's search competitors are on unequal terms there. (2) Free speech on social media. FB & Twitter's adhoc policies are becoming the de facto free speech laws. (3) biggest-dataset-wins feedback loops. All these have sheer size at their core.

solso 7y ago

When the monopoly is strong as Google is, with market shares around 90%, and they use 20-30% of their revenue for 'user acquisition' (they pay to be default in any platforms: from Apple, to Samsung, to Telcos, etc.) Basically they suck all the oxygen out of the room so that no-one can fight them. One would have to spend almost as much as Google, if not more, on user-acquisition. Unlikely to happen. Regulation is the only way to even the field a bit. DDG, Startpage and such, on the current instantiation, they are proxies to someone else search-backend. Does it serve for you (or anyone) to avoid using Google (directly)? Yes, of course, and that's actually great. Do they fix the underlying problem? No. Not unless a) they are building an independent/autonomous backend, and b) they get so much money that they can challenge Google on the user acquisition.

jldugger 7y ago
> One would have to spend almost as much as Google, if not more, on user-acquisition. Why is that a problem? Wouldn't decreased profitability be the sign of increased competition?
- solso 7y ago
  That's not a problem per se, it's just unlikely to happen because of the insane amount of the bill, and the roi is not that good anyway. For instance, Google pays Apple 9 billion/year to be the default search engine (incredible but True). On the account of 20-30% to user acquisition that means that Apple users can be monetized by Google at around 30B/year (9B/0.30). Google is extremely good at monetizing people, right, a competitor might not be as efficient, let's say half. That gives you 15B addressable revenue. Now the question. Would you pay Apple 10B to gain, at best, 15B? No one that crazy has this kind of money :-) On top of that, who prevents Google to pay 16B next year?
  - jldugger 7y ago
    > Would you pay Apple 10B to gain, at best, 15B? 30% APY Seems like a good deal to me! EDIT: more seriously, you don't start with iPhone. You start outbidding Google on the margins where your budget constraint less a factor. > On top of that, who prevents Google to pay 16B next year? Profit margins. Google's budget is not unlimited, after all.

ehnto 7y ago

I don't think it's that black and white. It's clear that they have enormous influence in the general population, and the amount of people who care about this kind of thing enough to switch to a different search engine are not enough to change that influence. Remember Microsoft once had an antitrust brought against it for shipping IE with their OS. Imagine now, shipping a phone to millions, with your browser that defaults every text input to a search string directly into your ad network.

RivieraKid 7y ago

Government intervention is the correct approach to dealing with monopolies when the market alone hasn't been able to do it, which is the case here. The only question is how. Maybe Google should be forced to limit the amount of ads they are showing.

earthboundkid 7y ago

AMP is exhibit A of why Google must be broken up. They have multiple monopolies (search, ads) which they use to reinforce each other. No one wants to make yet another version of their website using a completely different set of ads and analytics, but if that's what it takes to get better SEO, media companies will do it. It's an attack on the open web.

stingraycharles 7y ago

The network effect of an organization like Google is not to be underestimated: Google has many complementing services that all funnel you to their search engine. Because of this, other search engines are at a serious disadvantage if they want to compete. Also considering that search is very much a “winner takes all” market, where more users mean better results. These type of situations are typically bad for consumers, and there is very much a role for the government to steer the status quo away from this and support Google’s competitors. Whether that’s done by breaking up Google, taxing them more heavily, or something else is up for discussion. But simply telling people “just use DDG!” and considering that a viable solution to the problem is insufficient.

ttoinou 7y ago
Then we need another company to provide the same service. I disagree with "These type of situations are typically bad for consumers" : this exact situation happened because Google was good for consumers

tomtomtom777 7y ago

Maybe forcefully breaking them up is to much, but let's not pretend that breaking them up is acting against free market principles. Oligopolies like this exist because there is no free market. Government laws on things like intellectual property, profit taxes and most importantly, the limited liability of corporations are the necessary breading ground for organization into giants. In a pre-corporate "Adam Smith" style free market Google could not exist. In a sense, these giants are the opposite of a free market as every movement of value within large corporations is governed by hierarchical decision making with an almost military scheme. From this perspective, it isn't all that strange for governments to look into rules and regulations that can tame the beasts that they have created with their rules and regulations.

paulcole 7y ago

> Google spams search results with ads For god’s sake, it’s literally their business. It’s not spamming anymore than NBC showing ads during The Voice is spamming. You get something for no out of pocket cost and in exchange you are going to be shown ads.

headelf 7y ago

Isn't that what the government does– protects us from ourselves?

freediver 7y ago

> Yes Google spams search results with ads. But instead of using a different search engine such as duckduckgo.com, we're calling for the government to break up Google? your alternative suggestion is flawed. ddg shows ads too. actually it shows the same number of ads and roughly in the same manner as google did when it was the same size as ddg today. the real problem is ad-driven business model which makes all search engines (google, ddg, startpage) advertising companies first. you are what you sell.

aiphex 7y ago

Duckduckgo needs to change their name. I swear that's what's held them back.

lwhi 7y ago

The system we work within affects the way our society behaves, because free-market capitalism has failed us.

lwhi 7y ago
Okay ... I'll qualify that. The system has created vast inequalities of wealth, monopolisation by corporate structures that are too large to fail and helped to create and sustain a climate emergency that will change the face of life on the planet irreparably.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

drieddust 7y ago

What happens when replacement becomes big and starts behaving like new Google?