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If we ignore all this culture war bullshit for a minute there's a really fascinating issue here. The concrete issue is flight search. When you google "flight f

If we ignore all this culture war bullshit for a minute there's a really fascinating issue here. The concrete issue is flight search. When you google "flight from a to b", rather then seeing search results linking to websites for flight search, the first thing you see is the results of Google's own flight search. Is that wrong? What about image search? When you search for "skyline berlin", you'll see images of berlin's skyline, before you see links to other image search sites. Same is true for a lot other stuff. If you search "timer", you'll see a timer, not links to various timers that look ugly as shit. As a consumer, I love it. So much easier. On the other hand, google could take over almost any business like this. At least, any business that is "functional" in the sense that the only thing you really want is to get some output based on your input. There's a clear tradeoff here between what's good for consumers, and concerns about democracy, the concentration of power, etc.. And also innovation. Why start a new company, if google can just take over everything? There are only two clear, non-arbitrary rules: Search engines are only allowed to show a list of links, or search engines can show whatever they want.

foolfoolz 5y ago
no one is forcing you to use google. you could always pick a different one if you want different results
- heisthefox 5y ago
  For flights, you could just query the source directly: https://matrix.itasoftware.com/ https://matrix.itasoftware.com/
  - astrange 5y ago
    Not sure if that's "the source" since the airlines are the source for their own data (and Southwest doesn't allow ITA to search their flights.) On the other hand, Google owns ITA and I think the airline websites are typically frontends for it anyway.
- kdmccormick 5y ago
  Yes, obviously, you as a user are free to find another search engine. However, you as a creator are not free to find another universe in which the leading search provider does not use their position of influence to squash any competing products by ranking their own products higher.
  - mbreese 5y ago
    But that’s not an argument for making Google a public utility. That’s an argument that they are being anti-competitive. That’s a whole other discussion. And even then, the question isn’t are competitors being harmed, but are consumers being harmed. So long as their products are free, it’s hard to argue that consumers are suffering harm. (I haven’t heard privacy brought up as a legal measure of harm to consumers, which would be an interesting angle, but I’m not sure how that plays with current law…)
    - wyattpeak 5y ago
      > So long as their products are free, it’s hard to argue that consumers are suffering harm. Is it? There's an increasing antipathy towards the amount of data Google collect, many people on this forum, if not so much in the world at large, would consider that harm. If Google's hiding from me a better service that's also free, or even has an acceptable cost, I'd consider that harm. It's only hard to argue there's no harm if their product is identical to its competitors, which is basically never true.
    - _jal 5y ago
      > So long as their products are free, it’s hard to argue that consumers are suffering harm Well, that is the (Borkian) dominant understanding of antitrust right now, but it hasn't always been, and I think that view is under pressure again. It has never been clear to me why we must limit our view to consumers when looking at antitrust - there is always much more going on than how much things cost. It effects competitors (actual and would-be), the environment, related industries, available jobs, sometimes national security - monopolies can have huge impacts on lots of things. Why exactly is this super-reductive, artificially crabbed view the only measure of a monopoly's harm? Medium-term, I think the pendulum is swinging back.
- antihero 5y ago
  OP is not arguing the consumer is restricted in choice, more that Google can dominate the market of any information based business by coding a widget because they have a huge amount of data at their disposal. Much like if you make a good product and sell it on Amazon, Amazon can simply use their might to dupe your product and sell it as AmazonBasics. So innovation is stifled because the second it becomes profitable a giant can pluck it from your hands and use their power to squash you whilst making money from it. I am not sure what mechanisms within Capitalism are supposed to protect people from the simple power asymmetry of companies having far more resources money and lawyers doing what the fuck they like. There should be antitrust lawsuits against all of the giants abusing their power but, because of said power asymmetry, they of course have a huge amount of lobbying power in comparison to anyone else.
- johnswas 5y ago
  Ah yes, the "no one is forcing you" argument comes in almost every conversation where people complain about the truth of something. Almost as if they can do whatever they want and of course "no one is forcing you to use it". Also implying that you accepted the wrong doings but trying as best as you can to defend it.
- anders_p 5y ago
  You completely missed the point of the comment. Google is stealing ideas and products, that they know are viable through the metrics they gather from the search data. Then they implement those products and embed them ABOVE the search results. Effectively killing off the competitors, who invented and build the original products. HOW are developers free to avoid Google killing off their businesses like that?
  - sumedh 5y ago
    > Google is stealing ideas and products, that they know are viable through the metrics they gather from the search data. Doesnt Walmart and Amazon do that as well, looking at the data and then making their own in house products?
    - brokencode 5y ago
      Yes, and maybe they should be regulated too. They enjoy dominant positions in the market and blatantly rip off successful products down to the color and bottle shape.
      - unishark 5y ago
        But any idiot can figure out which are the successful products on those search engines. They are literally there trying to be found and broadcast their popularity. The patent system is for protecting ideas which the law allows to be protected.
        brokencode 5y ago
        But any idiot can’t get Walmart or Amazon to prominently place their copycat product on shelves or in search results. Only these retail behemoths can guarantee the competitive placement of their products in the market.
- russian-hacker 5y ago
  No one is forcing you to use an electrical company. You could always power your house with a bicycle generator. Therefore, electrical companies shouldn't be regulated as public utilities.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    Creating your own power plant, lugging gallons of oil for power generation, or hiring someone to 24/7 power you home via bicycle all cost a few orders of magnitude more than paying the utility company for service, and creating a competing utility company wouldn't make sense competitively in any way, so naturally there's a monopoly. For search engines, it's both easy to switch to a different one as a consumer and it's easy for someone new to come in and create a profitable competitor (see bing, ddg).
    - inetknght 5y ago
      > so naturally there's a monopoly. And, just as naturally, the government actually owns a lot of the distribution network. The producers provide into the distribution network, the customers receive from the distribution network, and the government regulates fair (by some definition thereof) access.
    - ascar 5y ago
      > creating a competing utility company wouldn't make sense competitively in any way, so naturally there's a monopoly So how come there are countries without a natural monopoly and with competing utility providers? Also running your own generator with oil isn't a few orders of magnitude (i.e. at least 100x) more expensive. I wouldn't be surprised if it's not even one order of magnitude more expensive, but maybe just twice as expensive. I also don't think GP's simile is good, but some of your arguments against it are just blatantly false.
      - judge2020 5y ago
        > So how come there are countries without a natural monopoly and with competing utility providers? Local governments own most U.S. utility lines and pipes, so a competing for-profit utility would have to go against the not-for-profit public service, leaving low to no room for profit and no reason to even compete. Fiber/cable/dsl lines are one of the few U.S. utilities with competition because the performance/reliability/features of the service can vary greatly and because almost no local governments ran their own ISP before private companies came in and ran their lines. I can bet that any area with a municipal ISP has a very low chance of seeing xfinity/att run their own fiber if they're not already servicing the area.
- craftinator 5y ago
  You could always write a program that fuzzed urls at random then downloaded whatever's at that address with curl!
- mxcrossr 5y ago
  Imagine if thirty years ago we declared the yellow pages a public utility.
heisthefox 5y ago
The funny part is that the flight search portion comes from their acquisition of ITA, which I was a part of (worked at ITA when it was acquired). The airlines contract with that system for their own internal search - so who is the real customer there?
codelord 5y ago
On the one hand it seems Google is unstoppable. Google can do everything. But I think iPhone showed an alternative path. Now most people are actually using apps (not Google) on mobile for different functionalities. I guess this is the argument that Google has been making but I buy that. My guess is 20 years from now Android, YouTube, Google Maps, etc. would be more valuable for Google than search.
- ksec 5y ago
  >Google is unstoppable. Google having to pay $10-$12B a year to Apple just for being default search engine. All while Apple is working on stopping cookies and now VPN that takes away all the information Google could use for Ads. And Siri Search being Apple's default recommendation results means most of the valuable ads search term revenue are now out of reach for Google. That is ~1.4B Apple Active Devices. ( Apple TV or other Appliance being counted or not is a rounding error ) and Growing. If App Store spendings are any indication Apple user tends to spend twice as much than Google Play. Basically Apple is squeezing Google left and right. ( Incidentally they are also what they are doing it to suppliers and developers )
deleted 5y ago
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hnick 5y ago
As a content creator rich snippets are such a bugbear. If you don't play the game then someone else's content and name shows up. If you do, there's a huge chance people get what they need and never visit your site. It's a Google wins, consumer wins, creator loses situation.
- lupire 5y ago
  Many focus on "content" that is more than one paragraph.
  - bushbaba 5y ago
    Ugh like recipes. With the damn recipe 10 pages down. I don’t care about your grandma’s life story. I just want to know how much flour to eggs ratio for pasta dough. Incredibly annoying.
    - hnick 5y ago
      Perhaps you wouldn't have found that recipe in Google if they didn't include all that bullshit. Are you frustrated because you rarely get shown links in Google that are just the recipe, no fluff? Maybe they exist but you never get to see them. They're playing by rules they didn't invent. The belief is this content gets indexed better than just recipes (which, when well written, are terse) and it should be placed above the recipe so it has higher priority. They might be mistaken but with the limited amount of information Google gives, and the fact that most places I stumble across on Google are doing it, I'm ready to believe it works.
    - Frondo 5y ago
      I dislike the content-spamming recipes for another reason -- they're an accessibility nightmare. I seem to get eye strain more easily than most, despite having normal vision when my eyes aren't hurting, so I use the screen reader a lot. Any of those recipe sites? they'll read through several minutes of navigations, links, ads, and story before getting to the site. I feel badly for anyone who must listen to that, i.e. who doesn't have an option to read it visually, what a horrible experience.
wrycoder 5y ago
That's known as "tying" - an illegal use of a overwhelming market position to leverage the market position of other products of the same company. That's the key thing that determines illegal monopolistic practice.
- Dracophoenix 5y ago
  I don't understand how the presence of information on a website constitutes tying. What the hell happened to free speech?
- MinorTom 5y ago
  That's true if you define Google as a link search engine, but what if you were to define it as a "solution finder"? This way it just fits into the definition.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
Apparently, Google Flight Search is not even close to the best alternative.1 https://www.frommers.com/slideshows/848046-the-10-best-and-worst-airfare-search-sites-for-2021 https://www.frommers.com/slideshows/848046-the-10-best-and-w... This is interesting because I always thought Matrix from ITA Software, a company Google acquired in 2010, was quite useful. Wonder if links to Skiplagged get subjugated in Google SERPs. If Google thinks it can replace other websites by providing better alternatives, that's great. But then the company should get out of the way and let users have a neutral source for a comprehensive inverted index of the rest of the web. If there is nothing else better out there, then let web users determine that for themselves. The index should be a public resource not controlled by one company that can see what users are searching for and engage in "front-running". (Websites that allow crawls by Googlebot, sometimes exclusively, are of course enabling the Google monopoly.) 1. Google bought Frommers in 2012 and nearly killed it. Thankfully the founder reacquired the rights. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frommers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frommers
- lupire 5y ago
  Users can check, Bing, Common Crawl, or even the other 9 links on the first page of Google Search for more search results, no?
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  I’ve used a number of those others, and at least via my personal scoring system, google flights is still by far the number one. Your link prioritizes very different things than I do, for example one of its top scoring sites has as a con that you can’t filter out 10+ hour layovers).
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
    "We also ignored any itinerary that would be hell to fly-basically anything increasing total travel time by more than half through excessively long layovers, too many stops, or flying way out of your way just to change planes. Airlines may think that makes for a viable plan, but we don't." Am I reading this wrong or does this indicate Frommer also prioritises avoiding long layovers. (I dislike the inclusion of the long layover options too but I have always thought the reason the sites include them is that they actually sell. I once met someone who took these long layover flights on popular routes that always have many shorter options, so I know such people exist.)
wyattpeak 5y ago
> There are only two clear, non-arbitrary rules I don't see any problem with having arbitrary rules so long as they roughly capture the spirit of the outcome people want. The eight-hour workday is an arbitrary rule. The age of majority is an arbitrary rule. Zoning boundaries are arbitrary. They all capture something we (most of us) fundamentally want, but the specific lines are approximate or convenient or customary.
- Qwertious 5y ago
  Yes, people often don't see the benefit of a discrete boundary - if everyone draws the line in the same spot, even just legally speaking, then everyone can coordinate their action whenever someone steps over it.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> There are only two clear, non-arbitrary rules: Search engines are only allowed to show a list of links, or search engines can show whatever they want. Those rules are just as arbitrary as all the possibilities in between.
toomanybeersies 5y ago
> Why start a new company, if google can just take over everything? It seems more and more common these days that people start companies specifically with the sole intention of being acquired by Google (or another large tech company).
zeteo 5y ago
Regardless of legal aspects it's hard to ignore that Google is now very much in the business of putting to sleep innovative products. Either they acquire the startup and no longer invest in it, or drive it out of the search results, or invent it first in their "moonshot" division and file patents with no intention of executing on them. (Note that the innovators themselves may not fare badly if they get acquired and/or employed by Google. But their product will at best stagnate, at worst be killed shortly.) In the last decade Google has no longer brought to the consumer anything major like Gmail, Google Maps or Chrome. I doubt it's because of inability to execute - they can and will hire large numbers of very smart people. It seems more like a conscious decision to err on the side of maintaining the ~2010 status quo.
throwaway888abc 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google#Google_Shopping_charges https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google#Goog... The scope (of showing nice timer by google on 'timer' search) is much broader spanning many verticals
unishark 5y ago
> On the other hand, google could take over almost any business like this. I have never worked with a technology company that would in danger of being taken over in this way. The examples you list are all free information you can find on the internet, which is precisely google's business. To run afoul of monopoly laws they need to do things like build their own restaurants and route searches to them rather than the other local restaurants the user was looking for. I assume they are doing this in some cases. But the last thing I want is to do a search and find the result list giving a bunch of new pages of lists, with yet more ads of course, to sift through next. Software engineers are enjoying a nice run, where one can make lots of money applying basic software skills anyone can learn, grabbing free info anyone can get, and utilizing libraries everyone gets with their computer/phone OS but has not been provided access to by their hardware vendor. Hopefully technology will keep changing so fast the run will last forever (as long as you keep hopping to the newest bleeding edge). But this seems like borrowed time to me, access to free info and your own computer's clock or whatever is a commodity anyone can provide, whether it's someone earlier in the chain selling the hardware, or just millions of hungry programmers in developing countries.
- greyman 5y ago
  >grabbing free info anyone can get Yes, that's true, the info is free in a sense that someone published it on the internet. But taking the weather companies as an example, someone has to measure the weather, and then compute the predictions. That'a real cost someone needs to pay. And that I think is the reason some people don't like what Google is doing - they are displaying the temperature, while someone else paid for it to be measured.
  - simonh 5y ago
    Google Search weather data is provided by weather.com in a commercial relationship with Google, so either Google is paying for the data like everyone else, or weather.com is providing it at their cost for their own reasons.
  - jonathankoren 5y ago
    TBF though, weather is like the worst example of rent seeking. The people that provide the most value to weather reporting and prediction is the federal government through the a National Weather Service. Private companies usually just repackage the free government provided reports, or they do some analysis on top of the government provided data. That’s what has always made AccuWeather’s attempt to “privatize” (in reality stop having the government publicly publish forecasts, but continue the hard work of data collection) the weather service transparent rent seeking.
xwdv 5y ago
> Why start a new company, if google can just take over everything? If your company is defeated by Google turning it into some widget then you don’t have much of a business, you just have a feature you monetized and isn’t really a long term source of revenue. You need rigorous innovation and a clear advantage over your competitors.
bjoyx 5y ago
False dichotomy. They could also show 3rd party timer and flight widgets in the search results.
traviswt 5y ago
Or they could be allowed to show whatever but are required to allow users to opt-in/out.
rgbrenner 5y ago
google could take over almost any business like this. That didn't happen to travel companies. Google added flights, but Booking Holdings (aka Priceline) continued to grow each year to 15B in revenue for 2019. (Huge drop for 2020 obviously.) If I type "<city> weather" google will show me the weather, but which weather company has shutdown because of that? Google news is in the search results, but there are a lot of news companies. Those info panels often come from wikipedia, but wikipedia is doing great. This is something that sounds true, but I'm having trouble thinking of an example where it has actually happened. Examples appreciated.
- minsc__and__boo 5y ago
  I think the whole argument is setting up the presupposition that Google kills non competitive businesses, and that's not what antitrust law is about. It's about protecting consumers, not competitors. Take Android for example. Did Google kill Blackberry with Android? Or was it other factors like the Blackberry CEO cannibalizing their R&D budget, and stubbornly refusing to give consumers what they wanted?
  - fraserharris 5y ago
    Research in Motion thought the Blackberry keyboard was their killer feature for business professionals. They were wrong. The iPhone killed Blackberry, not Android.
    - ksec 5y ago
      I tend to think it was Blackberry killed Blackberry, not Android or iPhone. Not willing to change and adapt is the recipe for disaster in tech industry. I am not aware of any other industry that moves as fast and at such scale where the whole industry shift.
      - antifa 5y ago
        I remember back in the day, I saw what android was about to do to the market, the writing was on the wall for palm and blackberry. My only thought was that it would be nice if blackberry rebased itself as a business+security focused flavor of Android devices. Sad to say, I've almost never seen a blackberry since.
SmellTheGlove 5y ago
I agree with you on how interesting the issue you raised is. I'm just cynical and I happen to think that won't be the issue that gets decided. I wonder aloud if this will boil down to a question of whether utilities can exist as services on non-utilities, given that we don't presently classify internet service as a utility.
ehsankia 5y ago
> When you search for "skyline berlin", you'll see images of berlin's skyline, before you see links to other image search sites. What's next, should they also show Bing and DuckDuckGo search results when you search for an arbitrary query too? The goal of Google isn't to link you to websites, it's to get you to your information as quickly as possible. Said information could be a website, just as it can be an image, a flight or a single sentence pulled into an Answer Box.
- ehsankia 5y ago
  Their motto is making the world's information accessible, not making the world's website accessible.
blntechie 5y ago
Same with sports scores. I’m surprised the various sports websites have not made a cry about this as part of anti-trust investigations. Maybe because those sports sites are still reliant on Google for their other page views? Which only makes it worse.
- Broken_Hippo 5y ago
  There is more at stake here, though: If folks cannot easily look up scored and things, who will they blame? Probably the sports sites and team owners. It would be similar to the companies disallowing sports scores to be printed in newspapers.
kbenson 5y ago
> There's a clear tradeoff here between what's good for consumers, and concerns about democracy, the concentration of power, etc.. Actually, you can just leave it as tradeoffs between what is good for the consumer short term and what is good for the consumer long term. Sometimes there are wider issues that affect democracy (e.g. social networks and information silos), but usually it's just an economic issue that people aren't looking at thoroughly enough. The reason we try to stop monopolies before they happen is not because they are hurting consumers at that point. Often they are underselling competitors to achieve their monopoly so consumers benefit and love them. We stop them because after they have that monopoly they no longer have good incentives to keep being beneficial for the consumer, so we avoid the problem before it is one.
amelius 5y ago
Yes, Google is a gatekeeper, and there's no denying about it. Fortunately, the EU has the upcoming Digital Markets Act, ensuring fair competition in the digital space. You can read more about it here: https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/digital-markets-act-ensuring-fair-and-open-digital-markets_en https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/euro...
stiray 5y ago
I think that some other example is needed to explain "As a consumer, I love it. So much easier." Please watch this, it is about not well known company called Luxottica that holds majority of world market for eyewear. There is a good posibilty that if you have sun glasses, they made them. It is not something technical, just simple merchandise, simple to understand: https://youtu.be/yvTWjWVY9Vo https://youtu.be/yvTWjWVY9Vo Since the video came out, they have also bought (actually "merged") one of the largest companies creating perscription lenses. Now, do you like what you see? Is it "so easy" and "good" for the customers? Do you love it? How is their status impacting you wanting to buy eyewear? Same is with google, amazon, microsoft, just name it. But yes, until they get a vast majority of market, they will not start to milk the users. As they want majority of market first.
- Dah00n 5y ago
  "99% believe they buy an American brand!" she says with horror in her voice. That i so.... American. While a monopoly is bad this is a very poor source to use to prove a point, even though they do admittedly have a point (like the broken clock being correct twice a day). The problem has absolutely nothing to do with it being an Italian company but that is of course a big point in any 60 Minutes video (US good, others bad) and I highly doubt it would have been made had it been Walmart instead of Luxottica. But to comment on-topic: I believe Google and/or search engines should be put under the same rules and laws as the EU did with Microsoft. Search engine is searchengine, not search/travelplanner/hotel finder/translator/whatever. It strangles competition and innovation. Google should include those other things from other services if another service will sell the service to Google or keep clear. Edit: In short, as the EU is already working on, Google and the likes that are gatekeepers, needs to be stopped or broken up.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
False dichotomy; when it comes to flights, they could show general information with links to flight companies. When it comes to images, they could limit themselves to small image previews / thumbnails. Of course, one reason why I for one prefer to stay on Google Images (and have an addon to go directly to an image file instead of the site it's on) is that the sites themselves have so much cruft on them. And they kinda have to, because there's no money to be made on a minimalist image hosting site, while there's plenty of expenses - wouldn't be surprised if the brunt of expenses is abuse prevention.
Nkuna 5y ago
My initial thinking behind any business idea was more often than not preceded by "what if Google clones my idea???!?!? :((((". Two things wrong with this line of thinking. First it assumes Google can execute on said idea better than me and that I can't innovate. Here's the thing though; the bigger a company is the slower it gets. Sure, they can implement processes but big always gets more complex. Being small gives you an edge. What you do with that edge will determine whether FAANG apes your idea or not. Secondly, big tech isn't immune to market forces. The more features they add, trying to please every last potential user leads to bloat. At some point their search experience is bound to get degraded from adding way too many features in pursuit of every last user. This adds more bureaucracy. More tech debt. More uncontrollable variables. Search in 2021, especially on mobile, is vastly different from even 5 years ago. There are more ads, more tracking, more fraud, more shady back dealing, more user hostile anti-patterns. Yes, users currently enjoy their product but at some point surveillance capitalism will get its reckoning (see Apple, Europe, regulation in general) and for all the various products they have, search is the only relevant one. Without Search, how 'threatening' is Google really? Same goes for Facebook and that hot mess of an app. News feed, groups, pages, dating, marketplace, messaging, watch, etc. All this reeks of a co. that's lost focus in pursuit of not ceding users to competitors. This just means when they fail (which they will!), they will fail spectacularly. My advice to you and myself is focus on a niche. Try to do things that will be hard for FAANG to reproduce by making your users love your product more. Competing head on with these behemoths is foolish, but a moat is possible nonetheless given proper execution.
troyvit 5y ago
Those are great examples of how a search engine works better at offering some services than any web site that might be surfaced by the results. It's more useful, more ... utilitarian one might say. That to me is why this lawsuit to declare google a utility is most interesting. Like electricity or natural gas these useful widgets turn a search engine into a substrate that people don't even realize they're using until it breaks.
Chris2048 5y ago
Luckily, search results are getting progressively worse, and these "value add" features also. Maybe there's a time for a web 2.0 (or, 3.0?) that can integrate APIs without HTML/markup specific to do so? I really just want to send out a query to various search caches, and get back results that are then merged into one dataset and shown in a native GUI. Forget this website shit.
- krapp 5y ago
  >Maybe there's a time for a web 2.0 (or, 3.0?) that can integrate APIs without HTML/markup specific to do so? Nah. That's what server-side cURL requests are for.
Maursault 5y ago
> When you search for "skyline berlin", you'll see images of berlin's skyline, before you see links to other image search sites. Not to defend Google, but to be fair, 1) when searching for images, you're searching for images, not "image search sites." To search for image search sites, you'd search "all" (not photos) for "image search," which mostly returns Google image search and Google image search help pages as top results, burying other image search engines on subsequent pages. Google's search algorithm does seem biased against competitor image search sites, but maybe Google search is really finding only articles. Searching "all" for "image search sites" returns links to articles listing image search sites. Searching for Yahoo images returns Yahoo Image Search as the top result. 2) the images search results are actually thumbnails, and also links, so you see the thumbs precisely at the same time that you see links to the sites that host each image search result.
ahallock 5y ago
> There are only two clear, non-arbitrary rules: Search engines are only allowed to show a list of links, or search engines can show whatever they want. I want companies to be able to design products that best serve customers, not ones limited by narrowly scoped product definitions. Google's search page has advanced beyond query + results, offering interactivity and shortcuts. I'm not saying we shouldn't be vigilant if they start abusing their position and dominating too many markets, but let's take that case by case. I also disagree that Google can simply take over other businesses so easily. They've failed so many times. You'd think Youtube Music would dominate, but Spotify is still more popular. YouTube TV? I cancelled that a while ago. What am I surprised about is that we don't have a really strong YouTube competitor. Twitch, TikTok, and Instagram have made some in-roads, but nothing I'd call a strong #2.
- inetknght 5y ago
  > I'm not saying we shouldn't be vigilant if they start abusing their position I think that's exactly what's going on though. > and dominating too many markets How many is too many? I could make the same argument for Walmart, Amazon, ... > but let's take that case by case. No. Let's not drown people in having too many lawsuits. It's time for a sea of change.
count 5y ago
Crucially, I went to Googles business first to look for things. In the olden days, if I went to AAA for travel advice, I'd get their partners and such recommended, not generic all-encompassing information. But I went to AAA for it. I don' see how this is any different. I can chose to go to not-google and Google then doesn't impact me. Does Walmart have to put anybody's stuff where they want in the aisles?
- ganzuul 5y ago
  > Does Walmart have to put anybody's stuff where they want in the aisles? That could be an incredible boon to the ecoconomy. As a younger man I gave up on the idea of making simple consumer products on realizing that the large supermarket chains around here could dash my work on the rocks by just a middle manager arbitrarily saying 'no' to stocking what I had made. So yes, I think those companies should be forced to work with local businesses.
  - count 5y ago
    Should you be forced to put my stuff in your house? These are private companies, where does that force end?
    - ganzuul 5y ago
      I don't like arguing with hyperboles like that. Please suggest something reasonable, which I even could agree to.
      - count 5y ago
        Why is that hyperbole? Is a store not a private place?
        ganzuul 5y ago
        > Should you be forced to put my stuff in your house? This is a hyperbole because a private home is completely different from what we are discussing. This should be obvious.
hedora 5y ago
> There are only two clear, non-arbitrary rules: Search engines are only allowed to show a list of links, or search engines can show whatever they want. Ohio is asking for a third option; common carrier status. Search and other monopoly infrastructure would be run at arms length from the rest of the business, and anyone could pay (the same as google) to integrate it into their own offerings.
o8r3oFTZPE 5y ago
What if Google did not develop flight search but acquired it by buying someone out. What if they did not develop image search but acquired it by buying someone out. What if they did not develop the good-looking timer but copied it from someone else. If Google was 100% responsible for developing everything they offer to consumers, then perhaps there is an argument that Google is good for consumers. However the truth is that Google Search is what they developed, it became the only search engine that most people use, and being a gateway tot he web and having the ability to spy on the world's web use is an unfair advantage that virtually no one else has. Anything that becomes popular Google can gobble it up. Consumers cannot get superior direct benefits from non-Google companies for long. Google will acquire any such companies sooner than later.
- thebeardisred 5y ago
  I'm not quite following if this is sarcastic or not. For example, Google did acquire flight search: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software
  - o8r3oFTZPE 5y ago
    Not meant to be sarcastic. A single, web-based company could offer wonderful coveniences for web users if 1. they know what "all" people are searching for on the web 2. they are enabled (by finance) and allowed (by law) to acquire any other company that aims to serve the needs of "all" people searching for stuff on the web. #1 is a capability held by no other company on the planet, except Google. The point is that a single, all-knowing company offering such wonderful conveniences is not necessary responsible for creating them. First, they had to 1. spy on peoples' searches to determine what stuff people were looking for on the web and 2. acquire other companies that had already worked out how to best provide that stuff. If the all-knowing company did not exist, the other companies providing the stuff that people were searching for would still exist. The all-knowing company is initially just a middleman. In some cases this middleman has not been content to simply connect people with the companies providing the stuff and take a cut (through selling advertising services). Rather, the middleman seeks to acquire the companies and provide the stuff itself (enhancing its spying capabilities).

foolfoolz 5y ago

no one is forcing you to use google. you could always pick a different one if you want different results

heisthefox 5y ago
For flights, you could just query the source directly: https://matrix.itasoftware.com/ https://matrix.itasoftware.com/
- astrange 5y ago
  Not sure if that's "the source" since the airlines are the source for their own data (and Southwest doesn't allow ITA to search their flights.) On the other hand, Google owns ITA and I think the airline websites are typically frontends for it anyway.
kdmccormick 5y ago
Yes, obviously, you as a user are free to find another search engine. However, you as a creator are not free to find another universe in which the leading search provider does not use their position of influence to squash any competing products by ranking their own products higher.
- mbreese 5y ago
  But that’s not an argument for making Google a public utility. That’s an argument that they are being anti-competitive. That’s a whole other discussion. And even then, the question isn’t are competitors being harmed, but are consumers being harmed. So long as their products are free, it’s hard to argue that consumers are suffering harm. (I haven’t heard privacy brought up as a legal measure of harm to consumers, which would be an interesting angle, but I’m not sure how that plays with current law…)
  - wyattpeak 5y ago
    > So long as their products are free, it’s hard to argue that consumers are suffering harm. Is it? There's an increasing antipathy towards the amount of data Google collect, many people on this forum, if not so much in the world at large, would consider that harm. If Google's hiding from me a better service that's also free, or even has an acceptable cost, I'd consider that harm. It's only hard to argue there's no harm if their product is identical to its competitors, which is basically never true.
  - _jal 5y ago
    > So long as their products are free, it’s hard to argue that consumers are suffering harm Well, that is the (Borkian) dominant understanding of antitrust right now, but it hasn't always been, and I think that view is under pressure again. It has never been clear to me why we must limit our view to consumers when looking at antitrust - there is always much more going on than how much things cost. It effects competitors (actual and would-be), the environment, related industries, available jobs, sometimes national security - monopolies can have huge impacts on lots of things. Why exactly is this super-reductive, artificially crabbed view the only measure of a monopoly's harm? Medium-term, I think the pendulum is swinging back.
antihero 5y ago
OP is not arguing the consumer is restricted in choice, more that Google can dominate the market of any information based business by coding a widget because they have a huge amount of data at their disposal. Much like if you make a good product and sell it on Amazon, Amazon can simply use their might to dupe your product and sell it as AmazonBasics. So innovation is stifled because the second it becomes profitable a giant can pluck it from your hands and use their power to squash you whilst making money from it. I am not sure what mechanisms within Capitalism are supposed to protect people from the simple power asymmetry of companies having far more resources money and lawyers doing what the fuck they like. There should be antitrust lawsuits against all of the giants abusing their power but, because of said power asymmetry, they of course have a huge amount of lobbying power in comparison to anyone else.
johnswas 5y ago
Ah yes, the "no one is forcing you" argument comes in almost every conversation where people complain about the truth of something. Almost as if they can do whatever they want and of course "no one is forcing you to use it". Also implying that you accepted the wrong doings but trying as best as you can to defend it.
anders_p 5y ago
You completely missed the point of the comment. Google is stealing ideas and products, that they know are viable through the metrics they gather from the search data. Then they implement those products and embed them ABOVE the search results. Effectively killing off the competitors, who invented and build the original products. HOW are developers free to avoid Google killing off their businesses like that?
- sumedh 5y ago
  > Google is stealing ideas and products, that they know are viable through the metrics they gather from the search data. Doesnt Walmart and Amazon do that as well, looking at the data and then making their own in house products?
  - brokencode 5y ago
    Yes, and maybe they should be regulated too. They enjoy dominant positions in the market and blatantly rip off successful products down to the color and bottle shape.
    - unishark 5y ago
      But any idiot can figure out which are the successful products on those search engines. They are literally there trying to be found and broadcast their popularity. The patent system is for protecting ideas which the law allows to be protected.
      - brokencode 5y ago
        But any idiot can’t get Walmart or Amazon to prominently place their copycat product on shelves or in search results. Only these retail behemoths can guarantee the competitive placement of their products in the market.
russian-hacker 5y ago
No one is forcing you to use an electrical company. You could always power your house with a bicycle generator. Therefore, electrical companies shouldn't be regulated as public utilities.
- judge2020 5y ago
  Creating your own power plant, lugging gallons of oil for power generation, or hiring someone to 24/7 power you home via bicycle all cost a few orders of magnitude more than paying the utility company for service, and creating a competing utility company wouldn't make sense competitively in any way, so naturally there's a monopoly. For search engines, it's both easy to switch to a different one as a consumer and it's easy for someone new to come in and create a profitable competitor (see bing, ddg).
  - inetknght 5y ago
    > so naturally there's a monopoly. And, just as naturally, the government actually owns a lot of the distribution network. The producers provide into the distribution network, the customers receive from the distribution network, and the government regulates fair (by some definition thereof) access.
  - ascar 5y ago
    > creating a competing utility company wouldn't make sense competitively in any way, so naturally there's a monopoly So how come there are countries without a natural monopoly and with competing utility providers? Also running your own generator with oil isn't a few orders of magnitude (i.e. at least 100x) more expensive. I wouldn't be surprised if it's not even one order of magnitude more expensive, but maybe just twice as expensive. I also don't think GP's simile is good, but some of your arguments against it are just blatantly false.
    - judge2020 5y ago
      > So how come there are countries without a natural monopoly and with competing utility providers? Local governments own most U.S. utility lines and pipes, so a competing for-profit utility would have to go against the not-for-profit public service, leaving low to no room for profit and no reason to even compete. Fiber/cable/dsl lines are one of the few U.S. utilities with competition because the performance/reliability/features of the service can vary greatly and because almost no local governments ran their own ISP before private companies came in and ran their lines. I can bet that any area with a municipal ISP has a very low chance of seeing xfinity/att run their own fiber if they're not already servicing the area.
craftinator 5y ago
You could always write a program that fuzzed urls at random then downloaded whatever's at that address with curl!
mxcrossr 5y ago
Imagine if thirty years ago we declared the yellow pages a public utility.

heisthefox 5y ago

The funny part is that the flight search portion comes from their acquisition of ITA, which I was a part of (worked at ITA when it was acquired). The airlines contract with that system for their own internal search - so who is the real customer there?

codelord 5y ago

On the one hand it seems Google is unstoppable. Google can do everything. But I think iPhone showed an alternative path. Now most people are actually using apps (not Google) on mobile for different functionalities. I guess this is the argument that Google has been making but I buy that. My guess is 20 years from now Android, YouTube, Google Maps, etc. would be more valuable for Google than search.

ksec 5y ago
>Google is unstoppable. Google having to pay $10-$12B a year to Apple just for being default search engine. All while Apple is working on stopping cookies and now VPN that takes away all the information Google could use for Ads. And Siri Search being Apple's default recommendation results means most of the valuable ads search term revenue are now out of reach for Google. That is ~1.4B Apple Active Devices. ( Apple TV or other Appliance being counted or not is a rounding error ) and Growing. If App Store spendings are any indication Apple user tends to spend twice as much than Google Play. Basically Apple is squeezing Google left and right. ( Incidentally they are also what they are doing it to suppliers and developers )

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

hnick 5y ago

As a content creator rich snippets are such a bugbear. If you don't play the game then someone else's content and name shows up. If you do, there's a huge chance people get what they need and never visit your site. It's a Google wins, consumer wins, creator loses situation.

lupire 5y ago
Many focus on "content" that is more than one paragraph.
- bushbaba 5y ago
  Ugh like recipes. With the damn recipe 10 pages down. I don’t care about your grandma’s life story. I just want to know how much flour to eggs ratio for pasta dough. Incredibly annoying.
  - hnick 5y ago
    Perhaps you wouldn't have found that recipe in Google if they didn't include all that bullshit. Are you frustrated because you rarely get shown links in Google that are just the recipe, no fluff? Maybe they exist but you never get to see them. They're playing by rules they didn't invent. The belief is this content gets indexed better than just recipes (which, when well written, are terse) and it should be placed above the recipe so it has higher priority. They might be mistaken but with the limited amount of information Google gives, and the fact that most places I stumble across on Google are doing it, I'm ready to believe it works.
  - Frondo 5y ago
    I dislike the content-spamming recipes for another reason -- they're an accessibility nightmare. I seem to get eye strain more easily than most, despite having normal vision when my eyes aren't hurting, so I use the screen reader a lot. Any of those recipe sites? they'll read through several minutes of navigations, links, ads, and story before getting to the site. I feel badly for anyone who must listen to that, i.e. who doesn't have an option to read it visually, what a horrible experience.

wrycoder 5y ago

That's known as "tying" - an illegal use of a overwhelming market position to leverage the market position of other products of the same company. That's the key thing that determines illegal monopolistic practice.

Dracophoenix 5y ago
I don't understand how the presence of information on a website constitutes tying. What the hell happened to free speech?
MinorTom 5y ago
That's true if you define Google as a link search engine, but what if you were to define it as a "solution finder"? This way it just fits into the definition.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

Apparently, Google Flight Search is not even close to the best alternative.1 https://www.frommers.com/slideshows/848046-the-10-best-and-worst-airfare-search-sites-for-2021 https://www.frommers.com/slideshows/848046-the-10-best-and-w... This is interesting because I always thought Matrix from ITA Software, a company Google acquired in 2010, was quite useful. Wonder if links to Skiplagged get subjugated in Google SERPs. If Google thinks it can replace other websites by providing better alternatives, that's great. But then the company should get out of the way and let users have a neutral source for a comprehensive inverted index of the rest of the web. If there is nothing else better out there, then let web users determine that for themselves. The index should be a public resource not controlled by one company that can see what users are searching for and engage in "front-running". (Websites that allow crawls by Googlebot, sometimes exclusively, are of course enabling the Google monopoly.) 1. Google bought Frommers in 2012 and nearly killed it. Thankfully the founder reacquired the rights. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frommers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frommers

lupire 5y ago
Users can check, Bing, Common Crawl, or even the other 9 links on the first page of Google Search for more search results, no?
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
I’ve used a number of those others, and at least via my personal scoring system, google flights is still by far the number one. Your link prioritizes very different things than I do, for example one of its top scoring sites has as a con that you can’t filter out 10+ hour layovers).
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
  "We also ignored any itinerary that would be hell to fly-basically anything increasing total travel time by more than half through excessively long layovers, too many stops, or flying way out of your way just to change planes. Airlines may think that makes for a viable plan, but we don't." Am I reading this wrong or does this indicate Frommer also prioritises avoiding long layovers. (I dislike the inclusion of the long layover options too but I have always thought the reason the sites include them is that they actually sell. I once met someone who took these long layover flights on popular routes that always have many shorter options, so I know such people exist.)

wyattpeak 5y ago

> There are only two clear, non-arbitrary rules I don't see any problem with having arbitrary rules so long as they roughly capture the spirit of the outcome people want. The eight-hour workday is an arbitrary rule. The age of majority is an arbitrary rule. Zoning boundaries are arbitrary. They all capture something we (most of us) fundamentally want, but the specific lines are approximate or convenient or customary.

Qwertious 5y ago
Yes, people often don't see the benefit of a discrete boundary - if everyone draws the line in the same spot, even just legally speaking, then everyone can coordinate their action whenever someone steps over it.

dragonwriter 5y ago

> There are only two clear, non-arbitrary rules: Search engines are only allowed to show a list of links, or search engines can show whatever they want. Those rules are just as arbitrary as all the possibilities in between.

toomanybeersies 5y ago

> Why start a new company, if google can just take over everything? It seems more and more common these days that people start companies specifically with the sole intention of being acquired by Google (or another large tech company).

zeteo 5y ago

Regardless of legal aspects it's hard to ignore that Google is now very much in the business of putting to sleep innovative products. Either they acquire the startup and no longer invest in it, or drive it out of the search results, or invent it first in their "moonshot" division and file patents with no intention of executing on them. (Note that the innovators themselves may not fare badly if they get acquired and/or employed by Google. But their product will at best stagnate, at worst be killed shortly.) In the last decade Google has no longer brought to the consumer anything major like Gmail, Google Maps or Chrome. I doubt it's because of inability to execute - they can and will hire large numbers of very smart people. It seems more like a conscious decision to err on the side of maintaining the ~2010 status quo.

throwaway888abc 5y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google#Google_Shopping_charges https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google#Goog... The scope (of showing nice timer by google on 'timer' search) is much broader spanning many verticals

unishark 5y ago

> On the other hand, google could take over almost any business like this. I have never worked with a technology company that would in danger of being taken over in this way. The examples you list are all free information you can find on the internet, which is precisely google's business. To run afoul of monopoly laws they need to do things like build their own restaurants and route searches to them rather than the other local restaurants the user was looking for. I assume they are doing this in some cases. But the last thing I want is to do a search and find the result list giving a bunch of new pages of lists, with yet more ads of course, to sift through next. Software engineers are enjoying a nice run, where one can make lots of money applying basic software skills anyone can learn, grabbing free info anyone can get, and utilizing libraries everyone gets with their computer/phone OS but has not been provided access to by their hardware vendor. Hopefully technology will keep changing so fast the run will last forever (as long as you keep hopping to the newest bleeding edge). But this seems like borrowed time to me, access to free info and your own computer's clock or whatever is a commodity anyone can provide, whether it's someone earlier in the chain selling the hardware, or just millions of hungry programmers in developing countries.

greyman 5y ago
>grabbing free info anyone can get Yes, that's true, the info is free in a sense that someone published it on the internet. But taking the weather companies as an example, someone has to measure the weather, and then compute the predictions. That'a real cost someone needs to pay. And that I think is the reason some people don't like what Google is doing - they are displaying the temperature, while someone else paid for it to be measured.
- simonh 5y ago
  Google Search weather data is provided by weather.com in a commercial relationship with Google, so either Google is paying for the data like everyone else, or weather.com is providing it at their cost for their own reasons.
- jonathankoren 5y ago
  TBF though, weather is like the worst example of rent seeking. The people that provide the most value to weather reporting and prediction is the federal government through the a National Weather Service. Private companies usually just repackage the free government provided reports, or they do some analysis on top of the government provided data. That’s what has always made AccuWeather’s attempt to “privatize” (in reality stop having the government publicly publish forecasts, but continue the hard work of data collection) the weather service transparent rent seeking.

xwdv 5y ago

> Why start a new company, if google can just take over everything? If your company is defeated by Google turning it into some widget then you don’t have much of a business, you just have a feature you monetized and isn’t really a long term source of revenue. You need rigorous innovation and a clear advantage over your competitors.

bjoyx 5y ago

False dichotomy. They could also show 3rd party timer and flight widgets in the search results.

traviswt 5y ago

Or they could be allowed to show whatever but are required to allow users to opt-in/out.

rgbrenner 5y ago

google could take over almost any business like this. That didn't happen to travel companies. Google added flights, but Booking Holdings (aka Priceline) continued to grow each year to 15B in revenue for 2019. (Huge drop for 2020 obviously.) If I type "<city> weather" google will show me the weather, but which weather company has shutdown because of that? Google news is in the search results, but there are a lot of news companies. Those info panels often come from wikipedia, but wikipedia is doing great. This is something that sounds true, but I'm having trouble thinking of an example where it has actually happened. Examples appreciated.

minsc__and__boo 5y ago
I think the whole argument is setting up the presupposition that Google kills non competitive businesses, and that's not what antitrust law is about. It's about protecting consumers, not competitors. Take Android for example. Did Google kill Blackberry with Android? Or was it other factors like the Blackberry CEO cannibalizing their R&D budget, and stubbornly refusing to give consumers what they wanted?
- fraserharris 5y ago
  Research in Motion thought the Blackberry keyboard was their killer feature for business professionals. They were wrong. The iPhone killed Blackberry, not Android.
  - ksec 5y ago
    I tend to think it was Blackberry killed Blackberry, not Android or iPhone. Not willing to change and adapt is the recipe for disaster in tech industry. I am not aware of any other industry that moves as fast and at such scale where the whole industry shift.
    - antifa 5y ago
      I remember back in the day, I saw what android was about to do to the market, the writing was on the wall for palm and blackberry. My only thought was that it would be nice if blackberry rebased itself as a business+security focused flavor of Android devices. Sad to say, I've almost never seen a blackberry since.

SmellTheGlove 5y ago

I agree with you on how interesting the issue you raised is. I'm just cynical and I happen to think that won't be the issue that gets decided. I wonder aloud if this will boil down to a question of whether utilities can exist as services on non-utilities, given that we don't presently classify internet service as a utility.

ehsankia 5y ago

> When you search for "skyline berlin", you'll see images of berlin's skyline, before you see links to other image search sites. What's next, should they also show Bing and DuckDuckGo search results when you search for an arbitrary query too? The goal of Google isn't to link you to websites, it's to get you to your information as quickly as possible. Said information could be a website, just as it can be an image, a flight or a single sentence pulled into an Answer Box.

ehsankia 5y ago
Their motto is making the world's information accessible, not making the world's website accessible.

blntechie 5y ago

Same with sports scores. I’m surprised the various sports websites have not made a cry about this as part of anti-trust investigations. Maybe because those sports sites are still reliant on Google for their other page views? Which only makes it worse.

Broken_Hippo 5y ago
There is more at stake here, though: If folks cannot easily look up scored and things, who will they blame? Probably the sports sites and team owners. It would be similar to the companies disallowing sports scores to be printed in newspapers.

kbenson 5y ago

> There's a clear tradeoff here between what's good for consumers, and concerns about democracy, the concentration of power, etc.. Actually, you can just leave it as tradeoffs between what is good for the consumer short term and what is good for the consumer long term. Sometimes there are wider issues that affect democracy (e.g. social networks and information silos), but usually it's just an economic issue that people aren't looking at thoroughly enough. The reason we try to stop monopolies before they happen is not because they are hurting consumers at that point. Often they are underselling competitors to achieve their monopoly so consumers benefit and love them. We stop them because after they have that monopoly they no longer have good incentives to keep being beneficial for the consumer, so we avoid the problem before it is one.

amelius 5y ago

Yes, Google is a gatekeeper, and there's no denying about it. Fortunately, the EU has the upcoming Digital Markets Act, ensuring fair competition in the digital space. You can read more about it here: https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/digital-markets-act-ensuring-fair-and-open-digital-markets_en https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/euro...

stiray 5y ago

I think that some other example is needed to explain "As a consumer, I love it. So much easier." Please watch this, it is about not well known company called Luxottica that holds majority of world market for eyewear. There is a good posibilty that if you have sun glasses, they made them. It is not something technical, just simple merchandise, simple to understand: https://youtu.be/yvTWjWVY9Vo https://youtu.be/yvTWjWVY9Vo Since the video came out, they have also bought (actually "merged") one of the largest companies creating perscription lenses. Now, do you like what you see? Is it "so easy" and "good" for the customers? Do you love it? How is their status impacting you wanting to buy eyewear? Same is with google, amazon, microsoft, just name it. But yes, until they get a vast majority of market, they will not start to milk the users. As they want majority of market first.

Dah00n 5y ago
"99% believe they buy an American brand!" she says with horror in her voice. That i so.... American. While a monopoly is bad this is a very poor source to use to prove a point, even though they do admittedly have a point (like the broken clock being correct twice a day). The problem has absolutely nothing to do with it being an Italian company but that is of course a big point in any 60 Minutes video (US good, others bad) and I highly doubt it would have been made had it been Walmart instead of Luxottica. But to comment on-topic: I believe Google and/or search engines should be put under the same rules and laws as the EU did with Microsoft. Search engine is searchengine, not search/travelplanner/hotel finder/translator/whatever. It strangles competition and innovation. Google should include those other things from other services if another service will sell the service to Google or keep clear. Edit: In short, as the EU is already working on, Google and the likes that are gatekeepers, needs to be stopped or broken up.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

False dichotomy; when it comes to flights, they could show general information with links to flight companies. When it comes to images, they could limit themselves to small image previews / thumbnails. Of course, one reason why I for one prefer to stay on Google Images (and have an addon to go directly to an image file instead of the site it's on) is that the sites themselves have so much cruft on them. And they kinda have to, because there's no money to be made on a minimalist image hosting site, while there's plenty of expenses - wouldn't be surprised if the brunt of expenses is abuse prevention.

Nkuna 5y ago

My initial thinking behind any business idea was more often than not preceded by "what if Google clones my idea???!?!? :((((". Two things wrong with this line of thinking. First it assumes Google can execute on said idea better than me and that I can't innovate. Here's the thing though; the bigger a company is the slower it gets. Sure, they can implement processes but big always gets more complex. Being small gives you an edge. What you do with that edge will determine whether FAANG apes your idea or not. Secondly, big tech isn't immune to market forces. The more features they add, trying to please every last potential user leads to bloat. At some point their search experience is bound to get degraded from adding way too many features in pursuit of every last user. This adds more bureaucracy. More tech debt. More uncontrollable variables. Search in 2021, especially on mobile, is vastly different from even 5 years ago. There are more ads, more tracking, more fraud, more shady back dealing, more user hostile anti-patterns. Yes, users currently enjoy their product but at some point surveillance capitalism will get its reckoning (see Apple, Europe, regulation in general) and for all the various products they have, search is the only relevant one. Without Search, how 'threatening' is Google really? Same goes for Facebook and that hot mess of an app. News feed, groups, pages, dating, marketplace, messaging, watch, etc. All this reeks of a co. that's lost focus in pursuit of not ceding users to competitors. This just means when they fail (which they will!), they will fail spectacularly. My advice to you and myself is focus on a niche. Try to do things that will be hard for FAANG to reproduce by making your users love your product more. Competing head on with these behemoths is foolish, but a moat is possible nonetheless given proper execution.

troyvit 5y ago

Those are great examples of how a search engine works better at offering some services than any web site that might be surfaced by the results. It's more useful, more ... utilitarian one might say. That to me is why this lawsuit to declare google a utility is most interesting. Like electricity or natural gas these useful widgets turn a search engine into a substrate that people don't even realize they're using until it breaks.

Chris2048 5y ago

Luckily, search results are getting progressively worse, and these "value add" features also. Maybe there's a time for a web 2.0 (or, 3.0?) that can integrate APIs without HTML/markup specific to do so? I really just want to send out a query to various search caches, and get back results that are then merged into one dataset and shown in a native GUI. Forget this website shit.

krapp 5y ago
>Maybe there's a time for a web 2.0 (or, 3.0?) that can integrate APIs without HTML/markup specific to do so? Nah. That's what server-side cURL requests are for.

Maursault 5y ago

> When you search for "skyline berlin", you'll see images of berlin's skyline, before you see links to other image search sites. Not to defend Google, but to be fair, 1) when searching for images, you're searching for images, not "image search sites." To search for image search sites, you'd search "all" (not photos) for "image search," which mostly returns Google image search and Google image search help pages as top results, burying other image search engines on subsequent pages. Google's search algorithm does seem biased against competitor image search sites, but maybe Google search is really finding only articles. Searching "all" for "image search sites" returns links to articles listing image search sites. Searching for Yahoo images returns Yahoo Image Search as the top result. 2) the images search results are actually thumbnails, and also links, so you see the thumbs precisely at the same time that you see links to the sites that host each image search result.

ahallock 5y ago

> There are only two clear, non-arbitrary rules: Search engines are only allowed to show a list of links, or search engines can show whatever they want. I want companies to be able to design products that best serve customers, not ones limited by narrowly scoped product definitions. Google's search page has advanced beyond query + results, offering interactivity and shortcuts. I'm not saying we shouldn't be vigilant if they start abusing their position and dominating too many markets, but let's take that case by case. I also disagree that Google can simply take over other businesses so easily. They've failed so many times. You'd think Youtube Music would dominate, but Spotify is still more popular. YouTube TV? I cancelled that a while ago. What am I surprised about is that we don't have a really strong YouTube competitor. Twitch, TikTok, and Instagram have made some in-roads, but nothing I'd call a strong #2.

inetknght 5y ago
> I'm not saying we shouldn't be vigilant if they start abusing their position I think that's exactly what's going on though. > and dominating too many markets How many is too many? I could make the same argument for Walmart, Amazon, ... > but let's take that case by case. No. Let's not drown people in having too many lawsuits. It's time for a sea of change.

count 5y ago

Crucially, I went to Googles business first to look for things. In the olden days, if I went to AAA for travel advice, I'd get their partners and such recommended, not generic all-encompassing information. But I went to AAA for it. I don' see how this is any different. I can chose to go to not-google and Google then doesn't impact me. Does Walmart have to put anybody's stuff where they want in the aisles?

ganzuul 5y ago
> Does Walmart have to put anybody's stuff where they want in the aisles? That could be an incredible boon to the ecoconomy. As a younger man I gave up on the idea of making simple consumer products on realizing that the large supermarket chains around here could dash my work on the rocks by just a middle manager arbitrarily saying 'no' to stocking what I had made. So yes, I think those companies should be forced to work with local businesses.
- count 5y ago
  Should you be forced to put my stuff in your house? These are private companies, where does that force end?
  - ganzuul 5y ago
    I don't like arguing with hyperboles like that. Please suggest something reasonable, which I even could agree to.
    - count 5y ago
      Why is that hyperbole? Is a store not a private place?
      - ganzuul 5y ago
        > Should you be forced to put my stuff in your house? This is a hyperbole because a private home is completely different from what we are discussing. This should be obvious.

hedora 5y ago

> There are only two clear, non-arbitrary rules: Search engines are only allowed to show a list of links, or search engines can show whatever they want. Ohio is asking for a third option; common carrier status. Search and other monopoly infrastructure would be run at arms length from the rest of the business, and anyone could pay (the same as google) to integrate it into their own offerings.

o8r3oFTZPE 5y ago

What if Google did not develop flight search but acquired it by buying someone out. What if they did not develop image search but acquired it by buying someone out. What if they did not develop the good-looking timer but copied it from someone else. If Google was 100% responsible for developing everything they offer to consumers, then perhaps there is an argument that Google is good for consumers. However the truth is that Google Search is what they developed, it became the only search engine that most people use, and being a gateway tot he web and having the ability to spy on the world's web use is an unfair advantage that virtually no one else has. Anything that becomes popular Google can gobble it up. Consumers cannot get superior direct benefits from non-Google companies for long. Google will acquire any such companies sooner than later.

thebeardisred 5y ago
I'm not quite following if this is sarcastic or not. For example, Google did acquire flight search: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software
- o8r3oFTZPE 5y ago
  Not meant to be sarcastic. A single, web-based company could offer wonderful coveniences for web users if 1. they know what "all" people are searching for on the web 2. they are enabled (by finance) and allowed (by law) to acquire any other company that aims to serve the needs of "all" people searching for stuff on the web. #1 is a capability held by no other company on the planet, except Google. The point is that a single, all-knowing company offering such wonderful conveniences is not necessary responsible for creating them. First, they had to 1. spy on peoples' searches to determine what stuff people were looking for on the web and 2. acquire other companies that had already worked out how to best provide that stuff. If the all-knowing company did not exist, the other companies providing the stuff that people were searching for would still exist. The all-knowing company is initially just a middleman. In some cases this middleman has not been content to simply connect people with the companies providing the stuff and take a cut (through selling advertising services). Rather, the middleman seeks to acquire the companies and provide the stuff itself (enhancing its spying capabilities).