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"Google owns or controls search distribution channels accounting for about 80% of search queries in the U.S., the officials said. That means Google’s competitor
by mattmcknight 6y ago
"Google owns or controls search distribution channels accounting for about 80% of search queries in the U.S., the officials said. That means Google’s competitors can’t get a meaningful number of search queries and build a scale needed to compete"
This doesn't seem right, technically speaking. I see estimates that globally they process 2 trillion searches per year (70,000 per second). 20% of that, 14,000 searches per second, seems a meaningful number of searches to scale to.
"The government will allege that Google uses billions of dollars collected from advertisements on its platform to pay mobile-phone manufacturers, carriers and browsers, like Apple Inc.’s Safari, to maintain Google as their preset, default search engine."
If the claim is that they are forcing people to use Google Search, reducing that 80% is going to require getting people to choose something else. The way that reducing the market share that is supposed to come from defaults has happened in the past is by forcing users choose which product to use instead. However, I posit that in this case a lot of the 20% comes from situations where there is a non-Google default. For example, one common request from people who notice is how to get Windows/Cortana to use Google instead of Bing.
https://www.howtogeek.com/226638/make-the-windows-10-start-menu-and-cortana-search-google-instead-of-bing/ https://www.howtogeek.com/226638/make-the-windows-10-start-m...
I would do some user research about what people want to use before assuming that a massive lawsuit with a remedy intended to give them a choice doesn't result in the same situation. My (small scale) research indicates that more than 80% of people want to use Google.
- sushicalculus 6y ago> 20% of that, 14,000 searches per second, seems a meaningful number of searches to scale to. This is only part of the story. 20% to me is not really meaningful. More importantly, Google wields power to affect the 80%. 20% is a paltry alternative.
- mattmcknight 6y agoFor scale, the % doesn't matter. The implication was that there wasn't enough data to drive ad serving.
- UncleMeat 6y agoBut the argument is that 20% isn’t enough to sustain another business. This is plainly false.
- voisin 6y agoDoesn’t it depend on how competitive the other 20% is? Having one player with 80% and the remaining 20% split amongst 20 companies would indicate market dominance and that the others are competing with each other and not meaningfully with the market leader. I think the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index[0] is used in these cases but I am not sure what it looks like for search. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herfindahl–Hirschman_Index https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herfindahl–Hirschman_Index