9 ms·

The businesses where Google is biggest and the ones where it isn’t

100 points by redm 6y ago

redm 6y ago
Paywall Free: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-businesses-where-google-is-biggest-and-the-ones-where-it-isnt-11603293145?mod=djemalertNEWS https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-businesses-where-google-is-...
throwaway5752 6y ago
And nobody else comes close to having a competitive search product. I've used DDG and Bing. Perhaps search is the utility lines/distribution and ads are the generation capacity, in a future disintermediation. It's hard to have a nuanced discussion about antitrust in the search market when this case is coming up 2 weeks before the election, and is actually about politically pressuring Google to give the party in power favorable treatment.
- milquetoastaf 6y ago
  Bing has excellent video search
  - kilroy123 6y ago
    The image search isn't too bad either.
    - edm0nd 6y ago
      IIRC Google Images copied Bing Images in their UX and visual style.
- x87678r 6y ago
  > And nobody else comes close to having a competitive search product. I've used DDG and Bing. This was certainly true 10 years ago, now I can't really tell the difference.
  - agrd00 6y ago
    I use DDG by default but will use Google. Honestly, I use search engines very little anymore. SEO games make them almost useless to me. Certain well curated Reddit feeds, and sources where it looks like people give a toss is my preference. IRC, Slack, Discord communities are real time with a person, and probably “better” for discovery. Let’s throw thousands of years of social evolution in the bin cause some billionaires can afford a lot of computers and exorbitant wages to have unscrupulous randos monopolize our exposure to the world. Ok Same with FB, Twitter; I’m not finding a need to connect to everyone over their cat pic firehose, and the noise. Edit: email works great for connecting to academics all over. Networking isn’t just through LinkedIn (which I also don’t use), and Upwork, or www at all. It’s just one of numerous conventions.
  - MrZander 6y ago
    For general queries, I agree. But for any technical query, I find Google to be 10x better. I used bing for about 6 months, but considering most of my searches are technical, I found myself switching to Google > 40% of the time and just gave up.
- krtkush 6y ago
  I use DDG and more often than not it is satisfactory. About 80% of my searches are via DDG and for the rest I have to use !g[1]. I usually end up adding "reddit" to my search terms to avoid crap results on both Google and DDG. [1]I was very curious about my DDG vs !g searches and ended up making an extension for FF which measures just that - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ddg-stats/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ddg-stats/
- freeone3000 6y ago
  Search and IR have incredibly strong network retrieval effects. Bing is great at "common knowledge" queries, in some cases better than Google. Bing is absolutely AWFUL at technical IR queries. Part of this is due to different index curation strategies, sure, but most of this is due to the learned behavior from the user base. With the current SOTA approaches, search network with more users fitting a profile is better able to return results for users that also fit that profile, so the most popular is the best nearly tautologically.
- jaywalk 6y ago
  I use Bing almost exclusively, and find it to be very good. Maybe a few times a year I go to Google to try and find something that Bing isn't finding, and it's very rare that Google turns anything up either.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  > is actually about politically pressuring Google to give the party in power favorable treatment. That's crazy. If Google has that power and will to wield it, they could wield it to remove that party from power, so the pressure is zero.
achow 6y ago
The chart inside says "Google captures over 92% of world-wide search traffic" - which I assume would include mobile or any other device (speaker etc). If yes, then the headline is misleading. (Mobile only headline is fine - 95%).
- perardi 6y ago
  Seems in line with other sources… https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-share-of-search-engines/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-...
Kique 6y ago
I can't read the article because of the paywall, but is this counting China? Since Google isn't used in China I can't see how they are hitting those %s worldwide.
- mtmail 6y ago
  The graph includes Baidu with about 1-2% (hard to read the graph) so I assume the worldwide numbers includes China.
genericone 6y ago
That just goes to show how effective "Googling" is compared to alternative Search tech. It's been said that "to Google" has generically come to mean "to Search", but I think googling has become a synonym not for "searching" but for "actually finding what you are looking for". When someone tells you to Google something, they are not telling you to do open ended research, they are telling you that you will definitely find the referenced information if you enter a specific term into the Google search bar.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  That just means it is an effective reference point index and accessible unlike say "Look at this $300 Introduction to Agronomy book ISB Number Y to tell you why what you said about modern agriculture not caring about soil erosion is completely wrong". If someone tells you to Google something it essentially implies that it is already answered and accessible like when asked how to spell a word answering "use a dictionary" means to stop wasting their time essentially.
KorematsuFred 6y ago
There is DDG and Bing. Google runs circles around them in terms of quality. Both DDG and Bing are not crappy, they are good but Google is just better. This is a bit like going after Tesla for capturing EV market. One can have dozen other reasons to hate and complain about Google but it is a simple fact that Google search is just too damn good and useful.
- laichzeit0 6y ago
  It’s debatable whether Google is better. I get different results for DDG that somehow Google just doesn’t care about or the results are just SEO gamed. For coding and mathematics I prefer DDG’s results.
  - can16358p 6y ago
    This is interesting. Coding results was the number one thing for me to give up DDG and go back to Google (unfortunately).
  - KorematsuFred 6y ago
    In my case it was opposite. For me DDG is pretty good for "how to I make bread" but really bad for "Is Math.random really random".
- x87678r 6y ago
  "is just better" isn't a very good distinction. Do you have an example of something that works only with Google? (I don't like Teslas either btw:-) )
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    "Elm list" (my classic example) in Google gives me the documentation page for the List datastructure, "<language> <concept>" being my most common query when trying to get work done, like "javascript array" leading me to the MDN docs. I will say that DDG has finally improved to at least providing a random tutorial for the List as its first result, but it still doesn't provide official docs and also suspects I might be asking about trees. Google consistently understands what's being asked here and knows to rank canonical documentations highly.
doar1p 6y ago
Google improves their search results by analyzing user behavior. Users want relevant search results. A search engine cannot provide them without massive amounts of search queries. Locking them in a 90%+ search monopoly. For competition to even be possible Google must open up it's data.
- worik 6y ago
  That is one of the fundemental flaws in Google's aproach, and one of the chief reasons I do not use it. I often hear people say "When you search for XXX the first few results are YYYY" to make a point. What they are telling you about is their bubble.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  Users want relevant search results If Google provided relevant search results, I might give it the benefit of the doubt; but it doesn't. For my searches, Google's results are such a dumpster fire of spam and cross-promotion that I've gone back to how I used to find information before search engines existed. And when I break down and use a search engine, it's the Duck. Google doesn't make money from people finding information. It makes money by keeping people on the treadmill of searching for information.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  It would be interested for user behavior data to be considered non-privatizable and mandated to be licensed non-discriminatorily like music.
ravedave5 6y ago
I have switched to DDG and about 20-30% of the time I have to switch to google. That said between DDG and firefox it's working! I am getting really vague generic ads sent to me instead of direct targeted ads. Ads in the wrong language, ads for products that have absolutely nothing to do with me. I love it.
- Spearchucker 6y ago
  I haven't used Google in years. Not sure how many but at least three. DDG is plenty good enough for me and of course Firefox, since Windows Phone got nixed. Being ex-Microsoft I was lucky enough to never have need of any non-search Google products (Gmail, sheets etc.).
- throwawaylolx 6y ago
  >about 20-30% of the time I have to switch to google. What kind of searches are you making? I switch for fewer than 1% of my searches.
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    Anything in Spanish. Anything technical. Also, for searches that "really matter" like when trying to get real work done, I end up trying them out in Google anyways to see if I missed anything. At which point, I wonder why I'm using DDG at all.
    - rleigh 6y ago
      Maybe it depends upon the specifics, but for technical queries I've found DDG to be hands down better than Google for years at this point. Google used to be great, but with the dropping of both code search and specific matching even when using quotes, I've found it to be pretty terrible in recent years compared with a decade back.
      - RonanTheGrey 6y ago
        Comes and goes for me. On an average technical search these days I'd say DDG is easily equal to Google and on the rare occasion I still have to switch to Google.
cwhiz 6y ago
It took less than 20 years for Google to go from "Don't Be Evil" to dominating the market in a similar way that Microsoft did. I think this speaks more to the fundamental problems of market pressure than anything else. Once Google became public they were beholden to shareholders to continue to grow and increase value. It's hard to do that without purchases, acquisitions, and defense of existing territory. I do think Google, and other companies, need to be fundamentally broken up. However, there seems to be some underlying problems in the public market way of life in America that almost forces companies down this path. I also think we need some broad new antitrust laws. Any market with fewer than 4 competitors is not a competitive market. Any market where a single competitor has more than 50% of the share is not a competitive market.
- dageshi 6y ago
  They dominated back during the "don't be evil days" not because they were evil, but because they were better. I don't believe for a second google ever had to play a single dirty trick or underhand tactic to reach the position in search they currently have, other markets maybe, but not search.
  - cwhiz 6y ago
    Google made a good browser and defaulted the search to their own engine. Then Google bought a mobile OS, bundled all the Google apps and services by default, and defaulted everything to their own browser with their own search engine. Google also paid Mozilla and Apple to default to Google search. Google made good products and good services and aggressively defended them through acquisitions and paid placement deals. It may be your opinion that these acquisitions and placement deals are not "dirty" or "underhanded" but I find them to be fairly anticompetitive.
    - hohloma 6y ago
      When google made Chrome, they already totally dominated the search market. Google search was launched 1997, Chrome was launched 2008.
can16358p 6y ago
I gave DDG many tries (as I really want to abandon literally everything Google), but no, the search results and speed are an order of magnitude inferior to Google's. I always find myself switching back to the evil, because that's the only viable option.
- peterwwillis 6y ago
  > the only viable option Let's not lie to ourselves. It's the option you prefer, not the only viable one. It's also a lie to pretend that Google is any more evil than DDG. Both are capitalist corporations marketing a story to convince people to give them money (in this case, to convince you to make money for them). Neither of these organizations have morals, they have profit margins and consumer strategies. "Privacy" is just the tech equivalent of "Organic", a marketing tool to convince you to choose their brand. Eventually Google will get on the "privacy train" and people will completely forget they were "evil", just like with Microsoft. It's all so much Eurasia versus Eastasia.
  - worik 6y ago
    No. Privacy really matters. "I have nothing to hide". Yea, Nah. More like: "I had nothing to hide, until I did, and then it was too late".
  - can16358p 6y ago
    Well in terms of getting the job done (accurately finding what I'm searching for), it is the only viable one.
newbie578 6y ago
I am going to use the same logic people defending Apple do. The monopoly doesn't matter, I love using Google :) Any product similar to it just sucks balls.. They are not a gateway to the internet, if you don't like Google, then don't use it..
dvduval 6y ago
And when Google has another product that competes against mine, I have to pay Google to advertise against Google. How fair of a playing field is that?
sul_tasto 6y ago
I’d like to recommend https://www.ecosia.org/ https://www.ecosia.org/
imglorp 6y ago
I'm kind of irritated the DOJ discussion is dominated by search. Google is full-on pervasive. They have your phone calls, your texts, your emails, your private conversations in your home, your body movements, your location history, your credit card history, and on and on. So yes addressing their search domination is one toe of the giant, but it's just a start.
dang 6y ago
Submitters: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Please don't cherry-pick the details from an article that you consider important, as the submitted title did ("Google Captures 95% of mobile search traffic and 92% of desktop traffic"). This is a form of editorializing because it frames that as the story for everybody. Titles are by far the most powerful influence on HN, so this is a big deal. We want the content/author to speak for themselves, not go through a layer of filtering by submitters. If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's great, but do so in the comments. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22level%20playing%20field%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
- frutiger 6y ago
  This is common knowledge for long time readers of HN. However, it would be nice if the submission UX encouraged this. Prefilling the title with the <title> tag after the URL has been entered and making the title read-only with an explicit action to make it modifiable would go a long way towards achieving what you’re asking for. As it is, going to submission page does not make this guideline very clear. People see two input fields and simply fill them in as they feel best.
  - boogies 6y ago
    The bookmarklet does this, but it seems like something complicated to do without JS.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
z3t4 6y ago
One thing Google has not solved is dublicate content. Often you search for something and all results are copies of the same article. There are some low hanging fruits of problems and the market is dying for a competitor.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  They aren't low hanging fruit. They are problems google has put thousands of people to work on for two decades. Your startup that manages to improve one detail is useless unless it handles the other details also.
  - z3t4 6y ago
    Lack of competition dis-incentivize development so I think you highly overestimate the effort and resources they put into the search itself. Not saying "duplicate content" is an easy problem though. Contrary if you solve that problem you can apply it elsewhere for example in spam prevention.
polote 6y ago
> Data from market research firm Datanyze suggest that YouTube is four times the size of the next-largest platform I have a hard time believing their figures, Youtube is only 4 times bigger than Vimeo? Well Vimeo is making 100M visit per month [1], Youtube is making 30B [2] [1] https://www.similarweb.com/website/vimeo.com/#overview https://www.similarweb.com/website/vimeo.com/#overview [2] https://www.similarweb.com/website/youtube.com/#overview https://www.similarweb.com/website/youtube.com/#overview
- mcintyre1994 6y ago
  It seems to be based on this maybe? https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/online-video--12/youtube-vs-vimeo https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/online-video--12/youtu... Apparently YouTube has 2,485,221 "websites" and Vimeo has 624,352. I have no idea what a website is in Datanyze parlance and can't find anything on their website that explains it. I'm also not sure what the pie chart is which seems to suggest they only have half the market between them while their market shares add up to 92.28%.
- Thaxll 6y ago
  Netflix ect ...
- michaelbrave 6y ago
  I've seen Vimeo start to have a bit of a niche where professional animators post there, musicians too. It's like where people put things they need online but not with the intent of being an influencer. I believe it still has to potential to grow.
  - N1H1L 6y ago
    Also softcore porn. Tumblr used to be pretty well known for that before Yahoo shut that down - and now Vimeo is the refuge for it
Steven_Vellon 6y ago
I have relatively low expectation for this suit to lead to anything substantial. This line of argument surrounding Google being the default search for devices largely mirrors the situation with Microsoft and Internet Explorer. I envision Google being told to stop paying to be the default browser, but that will likely do less to change Google's dominant role in search than it did for IE. People have proven to be willing to change their search option to use google when it gets defaulted to Bing or Yahoo. More broadly, I find that people's frustrations with large tech platforms aren't really related to monopoly at all. Concern is more about the growing reach and prevalence of tech companies. When I talk to people who are pretty heavily aligned with the "tech-lash" they're rarely talking about market share or leveraging dominance in one market for an advantage in another market. More often they're talking about capricious moderation and enforcement of content policies, and the general increase in the influence of tech companies on the products and media we consume. Anti-trust has limited ability alter the issues that most people have with big tech companies. Serving a broad customer base invariably leads to appealing to the lowest common denominator: no one set of rules will appease everybody, instead you try to develop rules to maximize the set of happy users and minimize the set of unhappy users. The scale of these tech companies necessitate automated rules enforcement, and this inevitably leads to false positives. I find it hard to see why breaking up tech companies would change this. Sure, if a big social media site was broken up into 4 different sites then each one would have a smaller population to manage. But they'd have commensurately less resources to dedicate to that community management, so they'll probably lean on automation just as much.
ffpip 6y ago
https://images2.imgbox.com/37/b1/BXoqfzLf_o.png https://images2.imgbox.com/37/b1/BXoqfzLf_o.png
- boogies 6y ago
  Thanks, but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24849041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24849041
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
neonate 6y ago
https://archive.is/h84fg https://archive.is/h84fg

100 points by redm 6y ago

redm 6y ago

Paywall Free: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-businesses-where-google-is-biggest-and-the-ones-where-it-isnt-11603293145?mod=djemalertNEWS https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-businesses-where-google-is-...

throwaway5752 6y ago

And nobody else comes close to having a competitive search product. I've used DDG and Bing. Perhaps search is the utility lines/distribution and ads are the generation capacity, in a future disintermediation. It's hard to have a nuanced discussion about antitrust in the search market when this case is coming up 2 weeks before the election, and is actually about politically pressuring Google to give the party in power favorable treatment.

milquetoastaf 6y ago
Bing has excellent video search
- kilroy123 6y ago
  The image search isn't too bad either.
  - edm0nd 6y ago
    IIRC Google Images copied Bing Images in their UX and visual style.
x87678r 6y ago
> And nobody else comes close to having a competitive search product. I've used DDG and Bing. This was certainly true 10 years ago, now I can't really tell the difference.
- agrd00 6y ago
  I use DDG by default but will use Google. Honestly, I use search engines very little anymore. SEO games make them almost useless to me. Certain well curated Reddit feeds, and sources where it looks like people give a toss is my preference. IRC, Slack, Discord communities are real time with a person, and probably “better” for discovery. Let’s throw thousands of years of social evolution in the bin cause some billionaires can afford a lot of computers and exorbitant wages to have unscrupulous randos monopolize our exposure to the world. Ok Same with FB, Twitter; I’m not finding a need to connect to everyone over their cat pic firehose, and the noise. Edit: email works great for connecting to academics all over. Networking isn’t just through LinkedIn (which I also don’t use), and Upwork, or www at all. It’s just one of numerous conventions.
- MrZander 6y ago
  For general queries, I agree. But for any technical query, I find Google to be 10x better. I used bing for about 6 months, but considering most of my searches are technical, I found myself switching to Google > 40% of the time and just gave up.
krtkush 6y ago
I use DDG and more often than not it is satisfactory. About 80% of my searches are via DDG and for the rest I have to use !g[1]. I usually end up adding "reddit" to my search terms to avoid crap results on both Google and DDG. [1]I was very curious about my DDG vs !g searches and ended up making an extension for FF which measures just that - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ddg-stats/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ddg-stats/
freeone3000 6y ago
Search and IR have incredibly strong network retrieval effects. Bing is great at "common knowledge" queries, in some cases better than Google. Bing is absolutely AWFUL at technical IR queries. Part of this is due to different index curation strategies, sure, but most of this is due to the learned behavior from the user base. With the current SOTA approaches, search network with more users fitting a profile is better able to return results for users that also fit that profile, so the most popular is the best nearly tautologically.
jaywalk 6y ago
I use Bing almost exclusively, and find it to be very good. Maybe a few times a year I go to Google to try and find something that Bing isn't finding, and it's very rare that Google turns anything up either.
srtjstjsj 6y ago
> is actually about politically pressuring Google to give the party in power favorable treatment. That's crazy. If Google has that power and will to wield it, they could wield it to remove that party from power, so the pressure is zero.

achow 6y ago

The chart inside says "Google captures over 92% of world-wide search traffic" - which I assume would include mobile or any other device (speaker etc). If yes, then the headline is misleading. (Mobile only headline is fine - 95%).

perardi 6y ago
Seems in line with other sources… https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-share-of-search-engines/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-...

Kique 6y ago

I can't read the article because of the paywall, but is this counting China? Since Google isn't used in China I can't see how they are hitting those %s worldwide.

mtmail 6y ago
The graph includes Baidu with about 1-2% (hard to read the graph) so I assume the worldwide numbers includes China.

genericone 6y ago

That just goes to show how effective "Googling" is compared to alternative Search tech. It's been said that "to Google" has generically come to mean "to Search", but I think googling has become a synonym not for "searching" but for "actually finding what you are looking for". When someone tells you to Google something, they are not telling you to do open ended research, they are telling you that you will definitely find the referenced information if you enter a specific term into the Google search bar.

Nasrudith 6y ago
That just means it is an effective reference point index and accessible unlike say "Look at this $300 Introduction to Agronomy book ISB Number Y to tell you why what you said about modern agriculture not caring about soil erosion is completely wrong". If someone tells you to Google something it essentially implies that it is already answered and accessible like when asked how to spell a word answering "use a dictionary" means to stop wasting their time essentially.

KorematsuFred 6y ago

There is DDG and Bing. Google runs circles around them in terms of quality. Both DDG and Bing are not crappy, they are good but Google is just better. This is a bit like going after Tesla for capturing EV market. One can have dozen other reasons to hate and complain about Google but it is a simple fact that Google search is just too damn good and useful.

laichzeit0 6y ago
It’s debatable whether Google is better. I get different results for DDG that somehow Google just doesn’t care about or the results are just SEO gamed. For coding and mathematics I prefer DDG’s results.
- can16358p 6y ago
  This is interesting. Coding results was the number one thing for me to give up DDG and go back to Google (unfortunately).
- KorematsuFred 6y ago
  In my case it was opposite. For me DDG is pretty good for "how to I make bread" but really bad for "Is Math.random really random".
x87678r 6y ago
"is just better" isn't a very good distinction. Do you have an example of something that works only with Google? (I don't like Teslas either btw:-) )
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  "Elm list" (my classic example) in Google gives me the documentation page for the List datastructure, "<language> <concept>" being my most common query when trying to get work done, like "javascript array" leading me to the MDN docs. I will say that DDG has finally improved to at least providing a random tutorial for the List as its first result, but it still doesn't provide official docs and also suspects I might be asking about trees. Google consistently understands what's being asked here and knows to rank canonical documentations highly.

doar1p 6y ago

Google improves their search results by analyzing user behavior. Users want relevant search results. A search engine cannot provide them without massive amounts of search queries. Locking them in a 90%+ search monopoly. For competition to even be possible Google must open up it's data.

worik 6y ago
That is one of the fundemental flaws in Google's aproach, and one of the chief reasons I do not use it. I often hear people say "When you search for XXX the first few results are YYYY" to make a point. What they are telling you about is their bubble.
reaperducer 6y ago
Users want relevant search results If Google provided relevant search results, I might give it the benefit of the doubt; but it doesn't. For my searches, Google's results are such a dumpster fire of spam and cross-promotion that I've gone back to how I used to find information before search engines existed. And when I break down and use a search engine, it's the Duck. Google doesn't make money from people finding information. It makes money by keeping people on the treadmill of searching for information.
srtjstjsj 6y ago
It would be interested for user behavior data to be considered non-privatizable and mandated to be licensed non-discriminatorily like music.

ravedave5 6y ago

I have switched to DDG and about 20-30% of the time I have to switch to google. That said between DDG and firefox it's working! I am getting really vague generic ads sent to me instead of direct targeted ads. Ads in the wrong language, ads for products that have absolutely nothing to do with me. I love it.

Spearchucker 6y ago
I haven't used Google in years. Not sure how many but at least three. DDG is plenty good enough for me and of course Firefox, since Windows Phone got nixed. Being ex-Microsoft I was lucky enough to never have need of any non-search Google products (Gmail, sheets etc.).
throwawaylolx 6y ago
>about 20-30% of the time I have to switch to google. What kind of searches are you making? I switch for fewer than 1% of my searches.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  Anything in Spanish. Anything technical. Also, for searches that "really matter" like when trying to get real work done, I end up trying them out in Google anyways to see if I missed anything. At which point, I wonder why I'm using DDG at all.
  - rleigh 6y ago
    Maybe it depends upon the specifics, but for technical queries I've found DDG to be hands down better than Google for years at this point. Google used to be great, but with the dropping of both code search and specific matching even when using quotes, I've found it to be pretty terrible in recent years compared with a decade back.
    - RonanTheGrey 6y ago
      Comes and goes for me. On an average technical search these days I'd say DDG is easily equal to Google and on the rare occasion I still have to switch to Google.

cwhiz 6y ago

It took less than 20 years for Google to go from "Don't Be Evil" to dominating the market in a similar way that Microsoft did. I think this speaks more to the fundamental problems of market pressure than anything else. Once Google became public they were beholden to shareholders to continue to grow and increase value. It's hard to do that without purchases, acquisitions, and defense of existing territory. I do think Google, and other companies, need to be fundamentally broken up. However, there seems to be some underlying problems in the public market way of life in America that almost forces companies down this path. I also think we need some broad new antitrust laws. Any market with fewer than 4 competitors is not a competitive market. Any market where a single competitor has more than 50% of the share is not a competitive market.

dageshi 6y ago
They dominated back during the "don't be evil days" not because they were evil, but because they were better. I don't believe for a second google ever had to play a single dirty trick or underhand tactic to reach the position in search they currently have, other markets maybe, but not search.
- cwhiz 6y ago
  Google made a good browser and defaulted the search to their own engine. Then Google bought a mobile OS, bundled all the Google apps and services by default, and defaulted everything to their own browser with their own search engine. Google also paid Mozilla and Apple to default to Google search. Google made good products and good services and aggressively defended them through acquisitions and paid placement deals. It may be your opinion that these acquisitions and placement deals are not "dirty" or "underhanded" but I find them to be fairly anticompetitive.
  - hohloma 6y ago
    When google made Chrome, they already totally dominated the search market. Google search was launched 1997, Chrome was launched 2008.

can16358p 6y ago

I gave DDG many tries (as I really want to abandon literally everything Google), but no, the search results and speed are an order of magnitude inferior to Google's. I always find myself switching back to the evil, because that's the only viable option.

peterwwillis 6y ago
> the only viable option Let's not lie to ourselves. It's the option you prefer, not the only viable one. It's also a lie to pretend that Google is any more evil than DDG. Both are capitalist corporations marketing a story to convince people to give them money (in this case, to convince you to make money for them). Neither of these organizations have morals, they have profit margins and consumer strategies. "Privacy" is just the tech equivalent of "Organic", a marketing tool to convince you to choose their brand. Eventually Google will get on the "privacy train" and people will completely forget they were "evil", just like with Microsoft. It's all so much Eurasia versus Eastasia.
- worik 6y ago
  No. Privacy really matters. "I have nothing to hide". Yea, Nah. More like: "I had nothing to hide, until I did, and then it was too late".
- can16358p 6y ago
  Well in terms of getting the job done (accurately finding what I'm searching for), it is the only viable one.

newbie578 6y ago

I am going to use the same logic people defending Apple do. The monopoly doesn't matter, I love using Google :) Any product similar to it just sucks balls.. They are not a gateway to the internet, if you don't like Google, then don't use it..

dvduval 6y ago

And when Google has another product that competes against mine, I have to pay Google to advertise against Google. How fair of a playing field is that?

sul_tasto 6y ago

I’d like to recommend https://www.ecosia.org/ https://www.ecosia.org/

imglorp 6y ago

I'm kind of irritated the DOJ discussion is dominated by search. Google is full-on pervasive. They have your phone calls, your texts, your emails, your private conversations in your home, your body movements, your location history, your credit card history, and on and on. So yes addressing their search domination is one toe of the giant, but it's just a start.

dang 6y ago

Submitters: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Please don't cherry-pick the details from an article that you consider important, as the submitted title did ("Google Captures 95% of mobile search traffic and 92% of desktop traffic"). This is a form of editorializing because it frames that as the story for everybody. Titles are by far the most powerful influence on HN, so this is a big deal. We want the content/author to speak for themselves, not go through a layer of filtering by submitters. If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's great, but do so in the comments. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22level%20playing%20field%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

frutiger 6y ago
This is common knowledge for long time readers of HN. However, it would be nice if the submission UX encouraged this. Prefilling the title with the <title> tag after the URL has been entered and making the title read-only with an explicit action to make it modifiable would go a long way towards achieving what you’re asking for. As it is, going to submission page does not make this guideline very clear. People see two input fields and simply fill them in as they feel best.
- boogies 6y ago
  The bookmarklet does this, but it seems like something complicated to do without JS.

deleted 6y ago

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z3t4 6y ago

One thing Google has not solved is dublicate content. Often you search for something and all results are copies of the same article. There are some low hanging fruits of problems and the market is dying for a competitor.

srtjstjsj 6y ago
They aren't low hanging fruit. They are problems google has put thousands of people to work on for two decades. Your startup that manages to improve one detail is useless unless it handles the other details also.
- z3t4 6y ago
  Lack of competition dis-incentivize development so I think you highly overestimate the effort and resources they put into the search itself. Not saying "duplicate content" is an easy problem though. Contrary if you solve that problem you can apply it elsewhere for example in spam prevention.

polote 6y ago

> Data from market research firm Datanyze suggest that YouTube is four times the size of the next-largest platform I have a hard time believing their figures, Youtube is only 4 times bigger than Vimeo? Well Vimeo is making 100M visit per month [1], Youtube is making 30B [2] [1] https://www.similarweb.com/website/vimeo.com/#overview https://www.similarweb.com/website/vimeo.com/#overview [2] https://www.similarweb.com/website/youtube.com/#overview https://www.similarweb.com/website/youtube.com/#overview

mcintyre1994 6y ago
It seems to be based on this maybe? https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/online-video--12/youtube-vs-vimeo https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/online-video--12/youtu... Apparently YouTube has 2,485,221 "websites" and Vimeo has 624,352. I have no idea what a website is in Datanyze parlance and can't find anything on their website that explains it. I'm also not sure what the pie chart is which seems to suggest they only have half the market between them while their market shares add up to 92.28%.
Thaxll 6y ago
Netflix ect ...
michaelbrave 6y ago
I've seen Vimeo start to have a bit of a niche where professional animators post there, musicians too. It's like where people put things they need online but not with the intent of being an influencer. I believe it still has to potential to grow.
- N1H1L 6y ago
  Also softcore porn. Tumblr used to be pretty well known for that before Yahoo shut that down - and now Vimeo is the refuge for it

Steven_Vellon 6y ago

I have relatively low expectation for this suit to lead to anything substantial. This line of argument surrounding Google being the default search for devices largely mirrors the situation with Microsoft and Internet Explorer. I envision Google being told to stop paying to be the default browser, but that will likely do less to change Google's dominant role in search than it did for IE. People have proven to be willing to change their search option to use google when it gets defaulted to Bing or Yahoo. More broadly, I find that people's frustrations with large tech platforms aren't really related to monopoly at all. Concern is more about the growing reach and prevalence of tech companies. When I talk to people who are pretty heavily aligned with the "tech-lash" they're rarely talking about market share or leveraging dominance in one market for an advantage in another market. More often they're talking about capricious moderation and enforcement of content policies, and the general increase in the influence of tech companies on the products and media we consume. Anti-trust has limited ability alter the issues that most people have with big tech companies. Serving a broad customer base invariably leads to appealing to the lowest common denominator: no one set of rules will appease everybody, instead you try to develop rules to maximize the set of happy users and minimize the set of unhappy users. The scale of these tech companies necessitate automated rules enforcement, and this inevitably leads to false positives. I find it hard to see why breaking up tech companies would change this. Sure, if a big social media site was broken up into 4 different sites then each one would have a smaller population to manage. But they'd have commensurately less resources to dedicate to that community management, so they'll probably lean on automation just as much.

ffpip 6y ago

https://images2.imgbox.com/37/b1/BXoqfzLf_o.png https://images2.imgbox.com/37/b1/BXoqfzLf_o.png

boogies 6y ago
Thanks, but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24849041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24849041

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

neonate 6y ago

https://archive.is/h84fg https://archive.is/h84fg