7 ms·

This doesn't seem like it's going to work. Given a choice between search engines pretty much everyone is going to choose Google. I think there are definitely

by treis 6y ago

This doesn't seem like it's going to work. Given a choice between search engines pretty much everyone is going to choose Google. I think there are definitely areas that Google acts anti-competitively. But search? The competitors are a URL away. And few use them because Google is just flat out better.

cwxm 6y ago
The question I would posit is: Do the actions from Google that the Justice Department consider to be anti-competitive prevent competitors from becoming better? For example, let's say I could be curious about DuckDuckGo if I had to choose a default search engine when I got an Apple device instead of Google being the default, then that could be revenue to DuckDuckGo for them to improve their search engine.
- ry_co 6y ago
  Regarding DuckDuckGo, my understanding is that though they have their own web crawler, most of the information is coming from Bing and Yahoo, who are the only direct competitors to Google.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - bduerst 6y ago
    You're mostly correct. Yahoo has been Bing for years, and DuckDuckGo pulls from Bing and Yandex - the latter being mostly for searches in Russian.
    - ColinHayhurst 6y ago
      I concur. https://www.searchenginemap.com/ https://www.searchenginemap.com/
- llimos 6y ago
  s/an Apple device/Chrome/
- treis 6y ago
  Before asking "should we" we need to answer "can we". If forcing Google to give users a choice results in them picking Google anyways then whether we should do that or not is irrelevant. Since it won't achieve it's stated purpose there's no point in forcing it.
- d1zzy 6y ago
  So what are you going to do, force Apple to sell their search default option for less money (whatever DuckDuckGo can afford to pay) in order to support more competition? It's really Apple's choice and interest what it does with the default search, Apple could decide tomorrow to point it to its own search engine and there's nothing Google, the DOJ or anyone else can do about it. Not really sure what the DOJ expect Apple or Google to do in this situation, it seems to me that 2 companies entered a mutually benefiting contract. You can't argue that Google "colluded" with Apple, there's a lot of throwing punches between each other (all the privacy oriented moves Apple is doing are hurting Google's business) and again Apple could be making its own search engine anytime they wanted, they already replaced Google Maps with their own thing.
  - nostromo 6y ago
    The monopolized market in this case would be the market for default search engines on mobile. If the only two players (Google and Apple) both use Google Search by default, then Google has effectively captured 100% of the mobile ad market. (And since Google is paying Apple et al for that default state, it is indeed a market.) The court could require device makers (including Google itself) to prompt users to select their search engine provider, or potentially ban Google from buying search engine defaults from other companies (Apple, Mozilla, etc.) as an anticompetitive practice.
    - jonas21 6y ago
      That's an interesting scenario. Let's say Google is banned from buying search engine defaults. Then Mozilla would no longer be able to sell the Firefox default to Google. Sure, they could sell it to someone else, but without the biggest player bidding up the price, it'd probably sell for a fraction of what it does today -- which could be devastating to Mozilla, given that almost all of their funding comes from the search deal. What would that do to competition in the browser space?
      - belval 6y ago
        Competition in the browser space is over and Chromium won. If this had been regulated earlier by preventing Google from preinstalling Chrome on all Android devices, we wouldn't be in this situation where Firefox is on life support, but here we are. Using Firefox as a reason not to break up some of Google's hold on search seems extremely short-sighted. Besides, Edge using Chrome changed the whole browser market dynamic as more and more people are using it. Once Microsoft reaches a somewhat decent percentage of install we will be back at a two (three?) player situation.
m-p-3 6y ago
The question is: does any of the competitors stand a chance against Google if they can't acquire more users and therefore improve their engine with the added revenue? Seems like a catch-22, and having Google as the default search engine everywhere, including in the web browser they make and that has the highest marketshare only exacerbate this.
cblconfederate 6y ago
Google's business is ads, not search
- wasdfff 6y ago
  What is search these days but an ordered list of advertisements matching your keyword
  - cblconfederate 6y ago
    wrong! they don't match I was just searching for "quill", a javascript editor. I clicked the first result without really looking (after all, i m searching name, right? ) - and it took me to some competing product called fro-something. I wasted my time, their money , yet google still made money.
    - drivebycomment 6y ago
      I just tried search for "quill" in incognito, and I got quill.com as the first hit (both ads as well as organic result) - apparently there's a company called Quill Corporation (quill.com). It seems reasonable to return that as the first hit. quilljs.com is 5th hit on the first page. "quill javascript" has quilljs.com as the first hit. This seems reasonable. What's your suggestion on how to make this better ?
      - cblconfederate 6y ago
        just checked my history, my first result was "froalla", happened more than once (the query must have been "quill js" or "quill editor" cant remember -- it's an example of the infamous 'google® tax' - an obviously keyword-targeted ad)
      - eitland 6y ago
        Here's another one: https://www.google.com/search?safe=active&client=firefox-b-m&ei=Dcx-X7D5CoyorgT7q7vQAQ&q=%22express-http-proxy%22+%22logging%22&oq=%22express-http-proxy%22+%22logging%22&gs_lcp=CgZwc3ktYWIQAzIECAAQRzIECAAQRzIECAAQRzIECAAQRzIECAAQRzIECAAQRzIECAAQRzIECAAQR1AAWABgzH1oAHADeACAAQCIAQCSAQCYAQCqAQdnd3Mtd2l6yAEIwAEB&sclient=psy-ab&ved=0ahUKEwjws9CoyKTsAhUMlIsKHfvVDhoQ4dUDCAw&uact=5 https://www.google.com/search?safe=active&client=firefox-b-m... It is a search for "express-http-proxy" "logging" but at leat I got maybe one relevant result and a bunch of wildly unrelated ones, despite doublequotes.
cma 6y ago
Default placement is way more powerful than typing in a URL, which most people never do for searching Google.
beezle 6y ago
Agree (responded in an earlier comment). If DOJ are going to look anywhere, it should be the advertising side of things and placement in search results (as opposed to sidebar ads). Even then, I'm not sure there is any case.
goodluckchuck 6y ago
>few use them because Google is just flat out better. I completely disagree with this part, but you're totally right on people continuing to use it. Search is highly dependent on the query. At first DDG's results seemed bad to me, but after a while I think I've changed how I write my searches. It's hard to explain, but I guess I'm putting more thought into understanding what it is that I hope to find. Now, Google's results seem to just be a listing of whoever did the best SEO targeting on the subject, and ultimately that means worse results for me. It's less about what I'm looking for and more about what Google has to show me... and Google always has something relevant to show me. When DDG doesn't, I'm forced to re-consider my query and try again, ultimately reaching a better destination. However, "change the way you search" is niche at best. Google is satisfying because it's so easy to use, that you almost don't even have to write a query. It's like an automatic "I'm feeling lucky" based on it's knowledge of you and your location and time of day, etc...
ericd 6y ago
There are structural issues that make it very difficult for new competitors to gain traction in search. For example, many website owners are now hostile to new web crawlers, but they're happy to allow Google to hammer their servers because they want that sweet, sweet search traffic. Mandating a commonly accessible crawl, with cached versions of the pages, would help new entrants a lot. Also, there're large network effects with ad networks. It seems unlikely that many marketing managers are going to take the time to do targeted keyword queries on your search engine with 1/1,000,000 the traffic of Google.
- fastball 6y ago
  I don't know a single website owner that is hostile to any search engine web crawler, unless that web crawler is slamming them with so many requests they're effectively getting DDoS'd.
  - Grimm1 6y ago
    Reddit, twitter, facebook are just three to start. There are plenty that disallow crawlers except google. We've crawled a significant amount now and just because you are unaware of them doesn't mean they don't exist. I can attest they're there. I'll also add plenty of sites don't block any engine but confer special privileges to google bot which depending on the site and their size are almost the same thing. Edit: And I'll add to limit confusion Reddit hides the sitemap and denies access there's is not an outright ban -- it just makes it a lot harder.
    - oh_sigh 6y ago
      Can't you just set your useragent to googlebot? Or something which isn't googlebot but which matches the most common regexes like "Not-Googlebot/2.1"
      - Grimm1 6y ago
        A lot of sites do some variation of these when you set googlebot as your UA, certainly the larger more sophisticated sites do. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/80553?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/80553?hl=en So unless you have a google domain your sol, it's also just generally frowned upon. We have our own UA WhizeBot with an email contact so you can let us know if our crawler is doing anything you'd rather it not. There have been a few legal cases that protect scraping publicly available information on the web but we'd rather follow robots.txt to avoid the potential for shenanigans in any case.
gonational 6y ago
It’s a bit like saying, in 1911, that given the choice between petroleum companies, everyone is going to choose Standard Oil, to which the answer is a resounding yes, of course they will. Ask anybody in much of the Midwest where they will choose to buy groceries and they will answer Walmart. This kind of reasoning is not an argument against the philosophy behind antitrust regulations. Rather, it is emblematic of the situation that monopolies create for themselves, by using their economies of scale to create pricing that cannot reasonably be expected to lose any competition over customers. The same economies of scale benefit consumers and the economy as a whole as long as the business behaves in a manner consistent with the shared values of society. As soon as they decide to behave differently, though, society is at the mercy of a monopoly because they have consumed the entire market.
stjohnswarts 6y ago
It will work most likely. We aren't in 2000 any more and both parties are mad Big Tech. There will definitely be some heads rolling in FAANG in the next few years.
xenadu02 6y ago
It's not illegal to be a monopoly - especially by providing a superior product or service. The case hinges on the no-compete, tying, and default placement agreements. If Google didn't pay anyone to be the default search engine, didn't require Android Phone makers to pre-install Google apps and make Google the default search in order to get access to Google services and the store, etc then there's no problem. The complaint also says that one of the reasons Google's results are better is the network and scale effects that come from owning 80-90% of search. A competitor has a very difficult time no matter how good their algorithm because you need insights you can only get when people use your service at scale. I don't personally know if that is true but that's part of the complaint. The proposed antitrust violation is likely the combination: using their dominant position to outspend any other players when paying for default placement to ensure they're the only one with the scale to have the best search results. That forms a self-reinforcing cycle: users who do choose pick you because you have the best results and you use that fact to fund no-compete and default placement agreements to ensure you have unmatched scale which further reinforces your ability to deliver the best results. Again: I don't know if this is true or a valid argument, but it seems to be what the complaint claims.

by treis 6y ago

cwxm 6y ago

The question I would posit is: Do the actions from Google that the Justice Department consider to be anti-competitive prevent competitors from becoming better? For example, let's say I could be curious about DuckDuckGo if I had to choose a default search engine when I got an Apple device instead of Google being the default, then that could be revenue to DuckDuckGo for them to improve their search engine.

ry_co 6y ago
Regarding DuckDuckGo, my understanding is that though they have their own web crawler, most of the information is coming from Bing and Yahoo, who are the only direct competitors to Google.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- bduerst 6y ago
  You're mostly correct. Yahoo has been Bing for years, and DuckDuckGo pulls from Bing and Yandex - the latter being mostly for searches in Russian.
  - ColinHayhurst 6y ago
    I concur. https://www.searchenginemap.com/ https://www.searchenginemap.com/
llimos 6y ago
s/an Apple device/Chrome/
treis 6y ago
Before asking "should we" we need to answer "can we". If forcing Google to give users a choice results in them picking Google anyways then whether we should do that or not is irrelevant. Since it won't achieve it's stated purpose there's no point in forcing it.
d1zzy 6y ago
So what are you going to do, force Apple to sell their search default option for less money (whatever DuckDuckGo can afford to pay) in order to support more competition? It's really Apple's choice and interest what it does with the default search, Apple could decide tomorrow to point it to its own search engine and there's nothing Google, the DOJ or anyone else can do about it. Not really sure what the DOJ expect Apple or Google to do in this situation, it seems to me that 2 companies entered a mutually benefiting contract. You can't argue that Google "colluded" with Apple, there's a lot of throwing punches between each other (all the privacy oriented moves Apple is doing are hurting Google's business) and again Apple could be making its own search engine anytime they wanted, they already replaced Google Maps with their own thing.
- nostromo 6y ago
  The monopolized market in this case would be the market for default search engines on mobile. If the only two players (Google and Apple) both use Google Search by default, then Google has effectively captured 100% of the mobile ad market. (And since Google is paying Apple et al for that default state, it is indeed a market.) The court could require device makers (including Google itself) to prompt users to select their search engine provider, or potentially ban Google from buying search engine defaults from other companies (Apple, Mozilla, etc.) as an anticompetitive practice.
  - jonas21 6y ago
    That's an interesting scenario. Let's say Google is banned from buying search engine defaults. Then Mozilla would no longer be able to sell the Firefox default to Google. Sure, they could sell it to someone else, but without the biggest player bidding up the price, it'd probably sell for a fraction of what it does today -- which could be devastating to Mozilla, given that almost all of their funding comes from the search deal. What would that do to competition in the browser space?
    - belval 6y ago
      Competition in the browser space is over and Chromium won. If this had been regulated earlier by preventing Google from preinstalling Chrome on all Android devices, we wouldn't be in this situation where Firefox is on life support, but here we are. Using Firefox as a reason not to break up some of Google's hold on search seems extremely short-sighted. Besides, Edge using Chrome changed the whole browser market dynamic as more and more people are using it. Once Microsoft reaches a somewhat decent percentage of install we will be back at a two (three?) player situation.

m-p-3 6y ago

The question is: does any of the competitors stand a chance against Google if they can't acquire more users and therefore improve their engine with the added revenue? Seems like a catch-22, and having Google as the default search engine everywhere, including in the web browser they make and that has the highest marketshare only exacerbate this.

cblconfederate 6y ago

Google's business is ads, not search

wasdfff 6y ago
What is search these days but an ordered list of advertisements matching your keyword
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  wrong! they don't match I was just searching for "quill", a javascript editor. I clicked the first result without really looking (after all, i m searching name, right? ) - and it took me to some competing product called fro-something. I wasted my time, their money , yet google still made money.
  - drivebycomment 6y ago
    I just tried search for "quill" in incognito, and I got quill.com as the first hit (both ads as well as organic result) - apparently there's a company called Quill Corporation (quill.com). It seems reasonable to return that as the first hit. quilljs.com is 5th hit on the first page. "quill javascript" has quilljs.com as the first hit. This seems reasonable. What's your suggestion on how to make this better ?
    - cblconfederate 6y ago
      just checked my history, my first result was "froalla", happened more than once (the query must have been "quill js" or "quill editor" cant remember -- it's an example of the infamous 'google® tax' - an obviously keyword-targeted ad)
    - eitland 6y ago
      Here's another one: https://www.google.com/search?safe=active&client=firefox-b-m&ei=Dcx-X7D5CoyorgT7q7vQAQ&q=%22express-http-proxy%22+%22logging%22&oq=%22express-http-proxy%22+%22logging%22&gs_lcp=CgZwc3ktYWIQAzIECAAQRzIECAAQRzIECAAQRzIECAAQRzIECAAQRzIECAAQRzIECAAQRzIECAAQR1AAWABgzH1oAHADeACAAQCIAQCSAQCYAQCqAQdnd3Mtd2l6yAEIwAEB&sclient=psy-ab&ved=0ahUKEwjws9CoyKTsAhUMlIsKHfvVDhoQ4dUDCAw&uact=5 https://www.google.com/search?safe=active&client=firefox-b-m... It is a search for "express-http-proxy" "logging" but at leat I got maybe one relevant result and a bunch of wildly unrelated ones, despite doublequotes.

cma 6y ago

Default placement is way more powerful than typing in a URL, which most people never do for searching Google.

beezle 6y ago

Agree (responded in an earlier comment). If DOJ are going to look anywhere, it should be the advertising side of things and placement in search results (as opposed to sidebar ads). Even then, I'm not sure there is any case.

goodluckchuck 6y ago

>few use them because Google is just flat out better. I completely disagree with this part, but you're totally right on people continuing to use it. Search is highly dependent on the query. At first DDG's results seemed bad to me, but after a while I think I've changed how I write my searches. It's hard to explain, but I guess I'm putting more thought into understanding what it is that I hope to find. Now, Google's results seem to just be a listing of whoever did the best SEO targeting on the subject, and ultimately that means worse results for me. It's less about what I'm looking for and more about what Google has to show me... and Google always has something relevant to show me. When DDG doesn't, I'm forced to re-consider my query and try again, ultimately reaching a better destination. However, "change the way you search" is niche at best. Google is satisfying because it's so easy to use, that you almost don't even have to write a query. It's like an automatic "I'm feeling lucky" based on it's knowledge of you and your location and time of day, etc...

ericd 6y ago

There are structural issues that make it very difficult for new competitors to gain traction in search. For example, many website owners are now hostile to new web crawlers, but they're happy to allow Google to hammer their servers because they want that sweet, sweet search traffic. Mandating a commonly accessible crawl, with cached versions of the pages, would help new entrants a lot. Also, there're large network effects with ad networks. It seems unlikely that many marketing managers are going to take the time to do targeted keyword queries on your search engine with 1/1,000,000 the traffic of Google.

fastball 6y ago
I don't know a single website owner that is hostile to any search engine web crawler, unless that web crawler is slamming them with so many requests they're effectively getting DDoS'd.
- Grimm1 6y ago
  Reddit, twitter, facebook are just three to start. There are plenty that disallow crawlers except google. We've crawled a significant amount now and just because you are unaware of them doesn't mean they don't exist. I can attest they're there. I'll also add plenty of sites don't block any engine but confer special privileges to google bot which depending on the site and their size are almost the same thing. Edit: And I'll add to limit confusion Reddit hides the sitemap and denies access there's is not an outright ban -- it just makes it a lot harder.
  - oh_sigh 6y ago
    Can't you just set your useragent to googlebot? Or something which isn't googlebot but which matches the most common regexes like "Not-Googlebot/2.1"
    - Grimm1 6y ago
      A lot of sites do some variation of these when you set googlebot as your UA, certainly the larger more sophisticated sites do. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/80553?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/80553?hl=en So unless you have a google domain your sol, it's also just generally frowned upon. We have our own UA WhizeBot with an email contact so you can let us know if our crawler is doing anything you'd rather it not. There have been a few legal cases that protect scraping publicly available information on the web but we'd rather follow robots.txt to avoid the potential for shenanigans in any case.

gonational 6y ago

It’s a bit like saying, in 1911, that given the choice between petroleum companies, everyone is going to choose Standard Oil, to which the answer is a resounding yes, of course they will. Ask anybody in much of the Midwest where they will choose to buy groceries and they will answer Walmart. This kind of reasoning is not an argument against the philosophy behind antitrust regulations. Rather, it is emblematic of the situation that monopolies create for themselves, by using their economies of scale to create pricing that cannot reasonably be expected to lose any competition over customers. The same economies of scale benefit consumers and the economy as a whole as long as the business behaves in a manner consistent with the shared values of society. As soon as they decide to behave differently, though, society is at the mercy of a monopoly because they have consumed the entire market.

stjohnswarts 6y ago

It will work most likely. We aren't in 2000 any more and both parties are mad Big Tech. There will definitely be some heads rolling in FAANG in the next few years.

xenadu02 6y ago

It's not illegal to be a monopoly - especially by providing a superior product or service. The case hinges on the no-compete, tying, and default placement agreements. If Google didn't pay anyone to be the default search engine, didn't require Android Phone makers to pre-install Google apps and make Google the default search in order to get access to Google services and the store, etc then there's no problem. The complaint also says that one of the reasons Google's results are better is the network and scale effects that come from owning 80-90% of search. A competitor has a very difficult time no matter how good their algorithm because you need insights you can only get when people use your service at scale. I don't personally know if that is true but that's part of the complaint. The proposed antitrust violation is likely the combination: using their dominant position to outspend any other players when paying for default placement to ensure they're the only one with the scale to have the best search results. That forms a self-reinforcing cycle: users who do choose pick you because you have the best results and you use that fact to fund no-compete and default placement agreements to ensure you have unmatched scale which further reinforces your ability to deliver the best results. Again: I don't know if this is true or a valid argument, but it seems to be what the complaint claims.