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> almost no consumer consciously chooses to use Google search anymore...Their monopoly over distribution - not search result quality - is what keeps consumers s

> almost no consumer consciously chooses to use Google search anymore...Their monopoly over distribution - not search result quality - is what keeps consumers searching Google I don't disagree with this as a fact, but I think there are a lot of things that work this way that aren't actually monopolies in the competition-preventing sense. If I wanted to launch a new breakfast cereal, getting my product into grocery stores would be one of the major challenges of starting that business. Competition for shelf space is a core concern of a lot of consumables. This definitely creates a lot of stickiness and barriers, and that comes with its share of downsides, but there are also good reasons that distribution systems work the way they do. Transaction costs are important.

jedwhite 5y ago
I don't think competition for shelf space is the right analogy here. Perhaps for Apps within the App Store you could argue that. But when there are only two mobile operating systems with meaningful market share, and when they make it impossible to change to a new search engine at all, and the results all come from only two sources (Google or Bing) that's a straight monopoly over distribution. It's a similar situation with the App Stores also. They are monopolies. We've gone from a world of personal computing where software was a free market with open choices, to a closed and proprietary world where there is only one available source of software.
- criddell 5y ago
  > We've gone from a world of personal computing where software was a free market with open choices, to a closed and proprietary world where there is only one available source of software. That’s true but at the same time I think most people are pretty happy with it. HN readers aren’t typical in this regard. I’ve been writing software as my job since the mid-80’s and it’s only been in the past 4 or 5 years where I realized that I’m finally pretty happy with the tech I use day-to-day. If I had any complaint it would be that app stores have made software too inexpensive. When I look at something like Procreate which I think cost something like $10, I’m blown away. This can’t be sustainable.
ColinHayhurst 5y ago
You have a point but shelf space is physically limited. Online real estate is not so limited. In my country there is reasonably healthy competition between supermarkets. Supermarkets do have self-branded products but they don't cross-sell competitors self-branded products. Here we have Apple with Google and Bing on their shelves. Microsoft have Bing and Google on their shelves. And Google have Goggle or Bing. Is that healthy or an oligopoly?
- oblio 5y ago
  > Online real estate is not so limited. It's limited. It's limited by our attention spans. There's a reason web designers call specific pages "valuable real estate". For example Google's search page, the one with the input, is probably the most valuable web real estate in the world, closely followed by the first page of results once you've typed your query and hit Enter. I'm willing to bet $100 that the second page of results probably gets less than 1000th the hits the first one gets. Heck, make that 1 millionth of the hits the first results page gets.
  - bduerst 5y ago
    That's silly. Everything is limited by the scarcity of human attention spans, not just websites. Shelf space refers to the market with which someone competes, not whether people are thinking of a candy bar or finding a bathroom or a facebook post. Your argument commits survivor bias because it's ignoring the millions of other websites that exist and are being used. Being popular does not mean something is a monopoly, nor does it mean there's limited shelf space. Following your example, if Google spammed Pixel ads on it's home page, the page would become less popular. One of the reasons it became so popular was it's strict adherence to focusing on utility.
    - int_19h 5y ago
      If a webpage doesn't show up on Google, it might as well not exist for most practical purposes. Regardless of why exactly this is the case, it's not a healthy state of affairs.
drzaiusapelord 5y ago
And then there's the problem of the difference between your cereal and the big ones aren't going to be big because cereal is a finished art. The same with search. My outcomes using bing or google are almost the same. The reality is a lot of good conversation is locked within social media discussions and reddit is the only one that allows it all to be public by default, hence google + reddit. We're moving to walled gardens and most of them will simply keep google out. Google is probably as good as it can be, but it just doesn't have access to discussions in places like private facebook groups, discord, etc. Not to mention reddit is terrible outside of tech concerns. It leans conservative, young, male, and white. As a woman, contributing there is an invitation for harassment. Even when I don't contribute I do things like research cars to buy only to see forums dominated by "car guys" who mock safety standards, focus only on performance and the "get laid" aspect of cars, and are dismissive towards groups like "soccer moms." Well, I'm a soccer mom and felt wholly unwelcome in those communities and the advice there is actually terrible advice for parents wanting to buy cars. Then there's a whole religion on gaming be it consoles vs consoles or vs pcs, or publishers or franchises and just endless tribalism. Politics is an absolute nightmare as you can imagine. The savvy reader will say "well you have to know how to sort the comments a special way and never visit the sub you want but the 'true' version of the sub you want, etc" which is a million times more hostile to non-technical people than scrolling past some google ads and finding an article about what they want from a reputable newpaper or consumer reports. Reddit is just too wild west to be a google replacement. Worse, the good content is almost impossible to find. Google weighs popular discussions more than recent ones so it keeps giving me discussions from many years ago, even if I try to put the year in the search box. It has no idea how to crawl reddit and make it digestible for us and the reddit leadership want nothing to do with google it seems, for capitalistic reasons of keeping out a potential competitor and having their search be really good "any day now." Posting to reddit is its own kind of nightmare, full of rules per sub, each different and with an algo that will decide if your question gets any visibility, often only getting mean spirited comments in return, if not harassment. For as far as facebook has fallen, I can still visit my town or neighborhood group and ask people what cars they like and get something of a normal discussion. At reddit, I'll be asked for nudes or just mocked/gatekept. If anything if google is an old man at web 1.0 then reddit is an old man at web 2.0. I suspect google with outlast reddit as reddit looks primed to be overtaken, a bit like how myspace, slashdot and digg looked like unstoppable juggernauts during their time. Its "manboy" culture and its super hostile default subs and everyday misogyny, transphobia, and racism scare normal people away. Forums have always been the seedy underbelly of the internet but reddit is seemingly proud of being seedy, with spez coming out to say that he welcomes covid disinformation when reddit was recently called out about how its become the home of covid conspiracy theories. If reddit was publicly traded and you asked me between google and reddit, I'd say buy google 100%. I think we'll be reading a lot more "what happened to reddit" articles in the near future, not "what happened to google" articles. Reddit becomes more toxic over time and that's just advertiser poison. Remember, it happily was the home of "jailbait" subs showing sexualized photos of children and "creepshots" showing non-consensual photos of random women until CNN called them out. If there was no call out, then spez would happily be selling those subs as points of pride and growth. "Reddit is the new google" narratives are very echo-chambery, shortsighted, and highly questionable. I think it forever remains this cesspool that chases away advertisers while Google continues to adapt to a new online world and continues to be vastly profitable. Meanwhile, Reddit has yet to make a profit.

jedwhite 5y ago

I don't think competition for shelf space is the right analogy here. Perhaps for Apps within the App Store you could argue that. But when there are only two mobile operating systems with meaningful market share, and when they make it impossible to change to a new search engine at all, and the results all come from only two sources (Google or Bing) that's a straight monopoly over distribution. It's a similar situation with the App Stores also. They are monopolies. We've gone from a world of personal computing where software was a free market with open choices, to a closed and proprietary world where there is only one available source of software.

criddell 5y ago
> We've gone from a world of personal computing where software was a free market with open choices, to a closed and proprietary world where there is only one available source of software. That’s true but at the same time I think most people are pretty happy with it. HN readers aren’t typical in this regard. I’ve been writing software as my job since the mid-80’s and it’s only been in the past 4 or 5 years where I realized that I’m finally pretty happy with the tech I use day-to-day. If I had any complaint it would be that app stores have made software too inexpensive. When I look at something like Procreate which I think cost something like $10, I’m blown away. This can’t be sustainable.

ColinHayhurst 5y ago

You have a point but shelf space is physically limited. Online real estate is not so limited. In my country there is reasonably healthy competition between supermarkets. Supermarkets do have self-branded products but they don't cross-sell competitors self-branded products. Here we have Apple with Google and Bing on their shelves. Microsoft have Bing and Google on their shelves. And Google have Goggle or Bing. Is that healthy or an oligopoly?

oblio 5y ago
> Online real estate is not so limited. It's limited. It's limited by our attention spans. There's a reason web designers call specific pages "valuable real estate". For example Google's search page, the one with the input, is probably the most valuable web real estate in the world, closely followed by the first page of results once you've typed your query and hit Enter. I'm willing to bet $100 that the second page of results probably gets less than 1000th the hits the first one gets. Heck, make that 1 millionth of the hits the first results page gets.
- bduerst 5y ago
  That's silly. Everything is limited by the scarcity of human attention spans, not just websites. Shelf space refers to the market with which someone competes, not whether people are thinking of a candy bar or finding a bathroom or a facebook post. Your argument commits survivor bias because it's ignoring the millions of other websites that exist and are being used. Being popular does not mean something is a monopoly, nor does it mean there's limited shelf space. Following your example, if Google spammed Pixel ads on it's home page, the page would become less popular. One of the reasons it became so popular was it's strict adherence to focusing on utility.
  - int_19h 5y ago
    If a webpage doesn't show up on Google, it might as well not exist for most practical purposes. Regardless of why exactly this is the case, it's not a healthy state of affairs.

drzaiusapelord 5y ago

And then there's the problem of the difference between your cereal and the big ones aren't going to be big because cereal is a finished art. The same with search. My outcomes using bing or google are almost the same. The reality is a lot of good conversation is locked within social media discussions and reddit is the only one that allows it all to be public by default, hence google + reddit. We're moving to walled gardens and most of them will simply keep google out. Google is probably as good as it can be, but it just doesn't have access to discussions in places like private facebook groups, discord, etc. Not to mention reddit is terrible outside of tech concerns. It leans conservative, young, male, and white. As a woman, contributing there is an invitation for harassment. Even when I don't contribute I do things like research cars to buy only to see forums dominated by "car guys" who mock safety standards, focus only on performance and the "get laid" aspect of cars, and are dismissive towards groups like "soccer moms." Well, I'm a soccer mom and felt wholly unwelcome in those communities and the advice there is actually terrible advice for parents wanting to buy cars. Then there's a whole religion on gaming be it consoles vs consoles or vs pcs, or publishers or franchises and just endless tribalism. Politics is an absolute nightmare as you can imagine. The savvy reader will say "well you have to know how to sort the comments a special way and never visit the sub you want but the 'true' version of the sub you want, etc" which is a million times more hostile to non-technical people than scrolling past some google ads and finding an article about what they want from a reputable newpaper or consumer reports. Reddit is just too wild west to be a google replacement. Worse, the good content is almost impossible to find. Google weighs popular discussions more than recent ones so it keeps giving me discussions from many years ago, even if I try to put the year in the search box. It has no idea how to crawl reddit and make it digestible for us and the reddit leadership want nothing to do with google it seems, for capitalistic reasons of keeping out a potential competitor and having their search be really good "any day now." Posting to reddit is its own kind of nightmare, full of rules per sub, each different and with an algo that will decide if your question gets any visibility, often only getting mean spirited comments in return, if not harassment. For as far as facebook has fallen, I can still visit my town or neighborhood group and ask people what cars they like and get something of a normal discussion. At reddit, I'll be asked for nudes or just mocked/gatekept. If anything if google is an old man at web 1.0 then reddit is an old man at web 2.0. I suspect google with outlast reddit as reddit looks primed to be overtaken, a bit like how myspace, slashdot and digg looked like unstoppable juggernauts during their time. Its "manboy" culture and its super hostile default subs and everyday misogyny, transphobia, and racism scare normal people away. Forums have always been the seedy underbelly of the internet but reddit is seemingly proud of being seedy, with spez coming out to say that he welcomes covid disinformation when reddit was recently called out about how its become the home of covid conspiracy theories. If reddit was publicly traded and you asked me between google and reddit, I'd say buy google 100%. I think we'll be reading a lot more "what happened to reddit" articles in the near future, not "what happened to google" articles. Reddit becomes more toxic over time and that's just advertiser poison. Remember, it happily was the home of "jailbait" subs showing sexualized photos of children and "creepshots" showing non-consensual photos of random women until CNN called them out. If there was no call out, then spez would happily be selling those subs as points of pride and growth. "Reddit is the new google" narratives are very echo-chambery, shortsighted, and highly questionable. I think it forever remains this cesspool that chases away advertisers while Google continues to adapt to a new online world and continues to be vastly profitable. Meanwhile, Reddit has yet to make a profit.