10 ms·

The Elephant in the Room: Google Monoculture

130 points by gavinballard 15y ago

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
bediger 15y ago
He makes a legit point, and he even raises the "Microsoft Monoculture" issue, asking why the folks alarmed about MSFT aren't alarmed by GOOG. I think they (and we) should be alarmed. Nevertheless, where are all the people, pundits, piemen and PR flacks that arose back when Dan Geer et al raised that monoculture issue? Whenever someone seriously raises a software monoculture as an issue, The Big Guns come out to discredit that someone, and to dismiss the issue. Where are the pundits now?
redthrowaway 15y ago
Can we get a [2009] in the title? It would be interesting to see some updated numbers on this, especially from SO. While I don't imagine many programmers are using Bing, it would be interesting to see where DuckDuckGo ranks.
- craigday 15y ago
  What I find interesting is that Stack Overflow has a really strong contingent of .Net/C# developers, so I assume these developers have a pretty reasonable investment in Microsoft technology, and not even they use Bing!
  - resnamen 15y ago
    Many Microsofties don't even use Bing.
- lambda 15y ago
  Even if Bing isn't all that popular with programmers, I'm pretty sure it would come in higher than Yahoo did in that list. As far as I know, Bing has actually had moderate success in getting some marketshare from Google, though nothing outstanding, and while programmers are not representative of wider demographics, you will probably see at least some of them using Bing.
  - dredmorbius 15y ago
    My understanding of Bing's "success" is that much of it has been in contracted search -- setting up Bing as the default search service for specific sites and/or online services, or something like that. No, I don't know specifics, but it's similar to earlier games MSFT played with IIS numbers -- setting up IIS as the default "parking" domain for some large domain registrars.
- jwesley 15y ago
  If anything Google has gained some share since then. The biggest change has been that it continues to suck more and more traffic away with ads, YouTube listings, Google Places listings, shopping results, Google's in house affiliate ads, Google Books, and anything else that pays Google or keeps traffic on Google sites. It's gotten so bad that in many verticals it is impossible to find an organic result without scrolling. Like this for example: http://www.seobook.com/images/ads-ads-ads.gif http://www.seobook.com/images/ads-ads-ads.gif
  - icebraining 15y ago
    I wonder why I don't get any ads above the "Related searches..." at all when I use the same query. I do use https://encrypted.google.com/ https://encrypted.google.com/ instead of plain google.com, maybe that affects the ads? In fact, I've just searched for a bunch of queries that I assume would have plenty of bidders (NFL, football, harry potter, ipad) and none of them had any ads box.
    - adgar 15y ago
      I hate to be that guy, but are you sure you don't have adblock on? I'm logged in, tried encrypted.google.com, and saw the expected ad results for all of those queries.
      - icebraining 15y ago
        It's OK, but I don't use Adblock. I do use NoScript, but all the domains for Google Search are whitelisted.
- spolsky 15y ago
  OK-doke, here's the last month of Stack Overflow search engine referral traffic. Google 69,081,674 visits Bing 520,543 visits Baidu 319,294 Search (CBS) 176,208 Yahoo 133,833 MSDN 109.875 Yandex 80.399 Naver 89,733 Ask 30,026 DuckDuckGo 25,492 AOL 6,409 Daum 4,462 Blekko 659
  - jmdugan 15y ago
    Just keep in mind: People who end up at Stack Overflow are heavily biased compared to the general Internet population - because they are looking for something that lead them to search for and then click a link to Stack Overflow. This same bias that selects the population will affect the choice of which search engine to use.
    - spolsky 15y ago
      Nice theory, but the data doesn't support it. We have other sites (cooking.stackexchange, diy.stackexchange) that are much more representative of the population at large. Even on those sites, you see a similar ratio... the second largest search referrer sends 1.6% as much traffic as Google (about twice as much as it sends to StackOverflow, but still virtually insignificant.)
      - jmdugan 15y ago
        Perhaps the selection bias is some combination of "understands how the Internet works / not willing to accept paid results in searches / looking for real facts and data" that lead users to use both Google and Stack Exchange? Clearly Google has an obvious and overt lead in all categories, and all search. I'm not sure how you can refute that the set of visitors to one site is not a biased sample compared to all Internet users. Your results are different than other published search engine use comparisons. If both are factual, then the measurements must come from different populations.
        jshen 15y ago
        "Your results are different than other published search engine use comparisons" Link please? The traffic for my site isn't as extreme as the stack exchange, but I'm seeing 9 times more traffic from google than bing. This leads to the same conclusion that Jeff came to. If Bing stopped sending me traffic tomorrow I wouldn't care. If google stopped sending me traffic I'd lose nearly all of my traffic.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
BillSaysThis 15y ago
This blog post is from 2009!!! An in-page search for 2012 gets zero results.
drhayes9 15y ago
I think one reason people aren't sharpening pitchforks and lighting torches is because every other search engine is one click away. Switching search engines is pretty frictionless compared to switching OSes.
- earl 15y ago
  In theory. Do the nontechnical people in your life even know other search engines exist? I doubt those in mine do.
  - dhconnelly 15y ago
    According to Alexa, Yahoo! is the #4 site on the internet, and Windows Live is the #7 site. So the millions of people who have Yahoo! and Windows Live for their homepages (and this is very common--remember that IE is still the dominant browser, and it defaults to Windows Live) are aware of those search engines. The reason Google is the search leader is not because nontechnical people don't know of the alternatives. It's the leader because it's synonymous with search and people think it's the best.
    - ootachi 15y ago
      Google is often set as the default search engine for IE in preinstalled OEM configurations (and frequently these days Chrome is the default browser). For antitrust reasons Microsoft can do nothing about this.
  - drhayes9 15y ago
    Heck, I'm not sure most people know what a search engine is. Wasn't "Google" one of the most-often heard answers to the question, "What is a browser?"
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - jonknee 15y ago
    Chrome asks you to choose a default search engine when you install it. What more can they do?
mekoka 15y ago
I'm a little surprised all the people who were so up in arms about the Microsoft "monopoly" ten years ago aren't out in the streets today lighting torches and sharpening their pitchforks to go after Google. Maybe people weren't so up in arms because of Microsoft's monopoly, but rather what they were doing with it. Apple didn't have a monopoly when I stopped being a fan.
- epistasis 15y ago
  This is precisely it, Microsoft in the 90s did some really abusive and messed up things, for example luring away Borland's key compiler engineers with ridiculous salaries, and then paying them to sit on their thumbs and do nothing [+], in order to give Microsoft's development tools time to catch up. I'm not a huge fan of Google, but if you're a startup you don't fear Google the way you would have feared Microsoft in the 90's. And if you're afraid of Google, it's because of legitimate competition in the marketplace, not nefarious anti-competitive practices. [+] Edit: As pointed out below, the "sitting on their thumbs" may just be local lore, and not true.
  - eurleif 15y ago
    >This is precisely it, Microsoft in the 90s did some really abusive and messed up things, for example luring away Borland's key compiler engineers with ridiculous salaries, and then paying them to sit on their thumbs and do nothing, in order to give Microsoft's development tools time to catch up. Why not pay them to build better development tools rather than to sit on their thumbs?
    - epistasis 15y ago
      You know, this was local Santa Cruz lore I'd heard mentioned a couple times, and I couldn't remember the details, so perhaps they are embellished stories by the Borland employees that stayed. Here's an old CNET article about a related lawsuit: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-279561.html http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-279561.html "Yocam maintains that Microsoft is luring personnel away with huge signing bonuses, some in excess of $1 million."
martian 15y ago
Noting that this article is from 2009, I think it makes some valid points. By owning people's entry to the internet, Google has a monopoly. But I don't think it's so much a monopoly on search that's interesting, as it is a monopoly on entry. Google is everyone's front door to the Internet. There are a few geeks like us who know about URLs and TLDs, but generally people just google what they're looking for. And on that note, I think there are other monopolistic gates to the internet being opened. Like the portals of old, Facebook is setting itself up to be the other Front Door on the Internet. Part of that is wrapped in what people care about most: other people. So it makes sense that you go to Google for things, places, and ideas; and you go to Facebook for people. Google realized it was missing that category of nouns and built Google+. Facebook knows it's missing a lot beyond people and is looking to expand into other nounish categories, but it's also looking to expand into verbs: listen, watch, read. I don't think Google has a monopoly forever -- I think it's fighting tooth and nail to stay at the top. I think there is fierce competition going on at all levels here, Facebook being the obvious example. And let's not forget Apple, Comcast, and other media providers who are using their control of media experiences to leverage control over people's experience of the Internet. The future is going to be interesting!
jmduke 15y ago
Okay, am I missing something? Microsoft wasn't a monopoly because their software pervaded rampantly; Microsoft was a monopoly because their entire business model bastardized the notion of vertical integration by making alternate software (ie competition) impossible, furthered by the costs of developing IE being (allegedly) baked into Windows. Is the "Google = Monopoly" argument that their bundling of GMail/Search/Plus/etc./etc. is discouraging competition?
- jerf 15y ago
  Yes, you're missing something, but it's a common thing to miss. What's illegal and immoral isn't the mere possession of a monopoly. What's illegal and immoral is the abuse of a monopoly position to shut out competition, corner the market, then raise prices above what a free market would bear. Microsoft was a monopoly because they sold 95+% of the operating systems on computers. Microsoft was convicted not of being a monopoly, but of abusing the monopoly. It is also interesting to observe that while Microsoft may have done some immoral things to obtain that monopoly (depending on how you look at it), that doesn't make the things they did before they had a monopoly illegal, or at least not for reasons of having a monopoly. Special scrutiny and rules are put in place for monopolists. Thus, it became illegal to bundle IE with Windows in some places, but that was a special ruling for MS only as a consequence of their monopoly status, it was not a general legal restriction against bundling. The claim that Google is a monopoly on search is simply an observation that they are servicing the vast, vast majority of searches. It does not logically follow that they are doing anything wrong; that is something that must be established separately. I for one don't see much evidence for Google abusing their monopoly in illegal or immoral ways. (Most of my complaints would center more around resting on their laurels, such as with their notoriously bad customer service, but there's nothing particularly illegal or immoral about that....) It is also valid to be personally concerned about the presence of a monopoly, even if it is not doing anything particularly wrong. The common category collapse of "monopoly" and "illegal monopoly" makes it hard to understand what's really going on.
- mdasen 15y ago
  Microsoft was a monopoly in the operating system market because they had near exclusive control of that market. Likewise, Google has near exclusive control of the search market. The term "monopoly" doesn't require abuse. I think the point of the article is to say that Google isn't abusing their monopoly power (by many people's standards), but that Google is nonetheless a monopoly and if they delist your site or otherwise abuse their power, you no longer exist as a viable business. We even have a recent example of this in the spat between Twitter and Google over Google+ results in search. Google is hiding behind the "you put 'nofollow' on them" line, but it seems a tad dishonest. Really, "nofollow" gets used to say "don't give them SEO points for this link". Even if one considers Google's position completely legitimate, it's also quite handy for Google. Now their Google+ service gets promoted over a competitor. Google's decision here is a use of their position to hurt a competitor. In fact, it's a lot like the Netscape situation. There's legitimacy to not indexing the Twitter content labeled with "nofollow" or integrating your own competitor right into your product. This is the same argument that Microsoft used about Internet Explorer. When a company has 10% of the market, we don't need to scrutinize so much. They don't have a lot of power. When a company controls such a high proportion of an industry, that changes. The author rightly identifies that if Google moves against you in their search index, it basically eliminates your business. There are always reasons. I'm glad about the moves Google has made against spammers in their index recently. However, when looking at the Twitter situation, I feel less positively. I personally don't use Twitter (or Google+), but I can recognize that Google's market dominance in search is going to hurt Twitter and promote their own competitor. Google+ may be better and there may be good technological reasons for the integration and the non-indexing of Twitter links, but when you're as dominant of search as Google is, I think a bit more scrutiny is warranted. Likewise, when Microsoft was so dominant of operating systems and started integrating their own browser into the OS, it was scrutinized. That doesn't mean there wasn't good technological reasons for the integration, just that Microsoft was of a size where it eliminates the viability of competitors. I have a lot of respect for Google and none of this is meant to sound anti-Google. At the same time, I agree with the author's premise that Google is so dominant of search that they could eliminate the viability of your business via their search index. That doesn't mean that they would do that. However, I think it means that certain moves should be viewed as being made by the only company in the industry - not one made by a single company among many competitors. And before one says "there's lots of alternatives like Bing, DDG, etc.", Microsoft had Apple, Be, Linux, and others, but they still held the power. The article isn't saying that Google is abusing their monopoly, just that they do have that power.
rorrr 15y ago
Here are the numbers for one of my sites, not related to IT in any way: Google 94.3% Yahoo 2.6% Bing 1.8% Yandex 0.63% Ask 0.37% AOL 0.23% EDIT: Here's another non-IT site with 13 million monthly visits: Google 89.9% Yahoo 6.4% Bing 2.96% Ask 0.37% AOL 0.21% Yandex 0.12%
- whatusername 15y ago
  So my 2011 figures (for a site for English Speaking SF/Fantasy fans) are about GOOG: 95% / Bing: 3% / Yahoo 2%
eslaught 15y ago
> But where's the healthy competition? Where's the incentive for Google to improve? People here might not like this answer, but honestly, Facebook. Look at Google+. You can like it or not, but it's clear that it's the biggest change to Google's product in a while.
ok_craig 15y ago
I'm really interested in hearing how people think this problem should be fixed, since Google having such a large market share is necessarily a bad thing. I see a lot of criticism, but no solution offering. But it's implied in all the anti-Google comments that either Google needs to stop making its product better, or it needs to be forcefully hampered by the government. Is this a correct assessment? If not, what are the alternatives?
- sdrinf 15y ago
  One alternative might be celebrating startups, and entrepreneurs, who publicly declare (pro- or retroactively) refusing acquisitions -from Google, or otherwise. One of the non-obvious consequences of this monopoly is all the other ways by which you could've navigated the Internet, that has been bought, paid for, then rapidly shut down by Google. Note there are many other ways you can acquire information that is relevant, and timely for you -social&topical communities, Q&A sites&channels, decision trees are but a few- it just happens that search got an early start on the R&D economies of scale.
  - ok_craig 15y ago
    I can get behind your first suggestion. Social influence can be huge, and it doesn't require a legal club to beat a company down with. Do you think it's necessarily a bad thing when smaller companies get bought by Google? What you don't mention in the case that all startups refuse a buyout is that the #1 search product improves at a much slower rate. Their technology may be interesting and useful, but in itself not enough to draw consumers, while if it were integrated into a larger product, it could bring that new technology to many more people much more quickly. Do we gain more by using technologies as individual products than we do by using them as parts of a larger, integrated whole? Probably sometimes we do. But always? I can't say I'm familiar with all the things you mention in your last point. But if I knew about all of them, understood their purpose and what value they served, do you think I would use them all? I feel like I would probably just type a Google search, which could potentially search all of those for me. I know social, I know Q&A - it doesn't really seem to me that with just those services, I would have a set of tools as powerful as Google itself. I use them on occasion, but for specific things. Search engines are general purpose question answerers - it seems like this is why they're more popular. I think if all of those services were out first, and then Google came along, it'd still be the most powerful and grow to be huger, because in general, it's more useful.
chrischen 15y ago
Google doesn't lock people into its search. People have a choice and they obviously choose Google.
- waterlesscloud 15y ago
  People had a choice regarding Windows in the 90s.
- Kliment 15y ago
  Website authors don't have a choice though. It's be on google or don't exist.
  - chrischen 15y ago
    That's not Google's fault. Google made a better product and consumers freely chose this. If Google arrives at a monopoly because of building a better product there is nothing wrong with this, but if Google arrives at a monopoly through manipulation and anti-competitive practices and then further using that monopoly position to sustain the monopoly then that's wrong.
cpeterso 15y ago
Any suggestions from people who have switched from Google to another search engine? I switched from Google to DuckDuckGo, but I gave up after a few days. DuckDuckGo's results were very good for popular/mainstream terms, but Google is much better at deep "needle in haystack" searches. I later switched from Google to Bing, but I gave up after one day. Bing's results were very random and stale. And Bing is ugly. :)
- guard-of-terra 15y ago
  Give Yandex a try. The results would be stale too but at least it looks nice.
- BCM43 15y ago
  I switched from Google to DuckDuckGo, but I gave up after a few days. DuckDuckGo's results were very good for popular/mainstream terms, but Google is much better at deep "needle in haystack" searches. When was this? It's gotten a lot better for me.
- white_devil 15y ago
  You could always just use DDG by default, and then resort to Google only when you really need it. That's what I've been doing for 1 - 2 years now.
bad_user 15y ago
The other Elephant in the room - with rich Javascript interfaces, crawlers are only feasible to build if you have enough resources - i.e. only companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are able to do it. Web pages are becoming increasingly less accessible and Google has a lot to gain by this trend. The writing on the wall is pretty clear - Google has a monopoly in search and the only way they can be disrupted is through alternative means of finding content (like social networks). Which is why, as much as I like them and their products, I find the integration with Google+ downright scary and dangerous for the health of our ecosystem.
- nostrademons 15y ago
  That's not really true - John Resig hooked Rhino up to a good-enough DOM model in a weekend: http://ejohn.org/blog/bringing-the-browser-to-the-server/ http://ejohn.org/blog/bringing-the-browser-to-the-server/ No, you're not going to match Google's crawling infrastructure or data extraction libraries. But if you just want to grab pages off the web, parse them, and handle JavaScript from those pages correctly, you can easily rig something up between Mechanize/html5lib/V8 or Nutch/Tika/Rhino.
  - bad_user 15y ago
    Crawling a couple of pages is different from crawling the entire web on a recurring basis. It was hard enough without the emergence of Javascript-enabled pages.
west13 15y ago
I haven't looked at every comment to see if anyone has stated the obvious: search is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more data you have, the better your results. The better your results, the more data you get. No one will make up ground on Google until a radical new algorithm is invented, and Google doesn't buy it :)
- resnamen 15y ago
  I don't think it's a matter of data access. I would argue that Bing has parity with Google in most respects (they have the same Internet to crawl, partnerships with some data providers for things like flight search, etc.), and they even have decisive advantages in other areas, like access to huge piles of social data. So why aren't they as good or better?
bishnu 15y ago
I mean the difference is that a search engine is a search engine - it's not a platform a whole bunch of people need to be using to be more effective. Ditching Microsoft in the 90s meant ditching Office, the best selection of games, etc. Whereas every other search engine works just as well (potentially) as Google search.
mbesto 15y ago
Let's be clear first on what Google's product is and what it's selling. Google's product is pageviews (or eyes). It sources these pageviews effectively for free (from you and I) and sells them to companies. The end-user who does the search is a marginal piece of the product that Google is selling. Therefore you can't say Google has a monopoly on search, because there is no market for search, since no one is paying for a product called search. edit:spelling
phear 15y ago
http://mashable.com/2012/01/12/bing-overtakes-yahoo/...The http://mashable.com/2012/01/12/bing-overtakes-yahoo/...The latest from mashable. Google still waaay ahead in 1st place. Notable is that when Bing first came out many blogs were talking about what was wrong with it and why it would die. They've slowly come a logn way(helped in part by Yahoo's problems). Do they have what it takes to be the thorn in google's flesh that xbox is in Sony's?
tzury 15y ago
That is a must I would say in our era. See, given one of the fundamentals in the Unix philosophical idiom is Make each program do one thing well. In an era of Software as a Service, it is Make each service do one thing well.

130 points by gavinballard 15y ago

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

He makes a legit point, and he even raises the "Microsoft Monoculture" issue, asking why the folks alarmed about MSFT aren't alarmed by GOOG. I think they (and we) should be alarmed. Nevertheless, where are all the people, pundits, piemen and PR flacks that arose back when Dan Geer et al raised that monoculture issue? Whenever someone seriously raises a software monoculture as an issue, The Big Guns come out to discredit that someone, and to dismiss the issue. Where are the pundits now?

redthrowaway 15y ago

Can we get a [2009] in the title? It would be interesting to see some updated numbers on this, especially from SO. While I don't imagine many programmers are using Bing, it would be interesting to see where DuckDuckGo ranks.

craigday 15y ago
What I find interesting is that Stack Overflow has a really strong contingent of .Net/C# developers, so I assume these developers have a pretty reasonable investment in Microsoft technology, and not even they use Bing!
- resnamen 15y ago
  Many Microsofties don't even use Bing.
lambda 15y ago
Even if Bing isn't all that popular with programmers, I'm pretty sure it would come in higher than Yahoo did in that list. As far as I know, Bing has actually had moderate success in getting some marketshare from Google, though nothing outstanding, and while programmers are not representative of wider demographics, you will probably see at least some of them using Bing.
- dredmorbius 15y ago
  My understanding of Bing's "success" is that much of it has been in contracted search -- setting up Bing as the default search service for specific sites and/or online services, or something like that. No, I don't know specifics, but it's similar to earlier games MSFT played with IIS numbers -- setting up IIS as the default "parking" domain for some large domain registrars.
jwesley 15y ago
If anything Google has gained some share since then. The biggest change has been that it continues to suck more and more traffic away with ads, YouTube listings, Google Places listings, shopping results, Google's in house affiliate ads, Google Books, and anything else that pays Google or keeps traffic on Google sites. It's gotten so bad that in many verticals it is impossible to find an organic result without scrolling. Like this for example: http://www.seobook.com/images/ads-ads-ads.gif http://www.seobook.com/images/ads-ads-ads.gif
- icebraining 15y ago
  I wonder why I don't get any ads above the "Related searches..." at all when I use the same query. I do use https://encrypted.google.com/ https://encrypted.google.com/ instead of plain google.com, maybe that affects the ads? In fact, I've just searched for a bunch of queries that I assume would have plenty of bidders (NFL, football, harry potter, ipad) and none of them had any ads box.
  - adgar 15y ago
    I hate to be that guy, but are you sure you don't have adblock on? I'm logged in, tried encrypted.google.com, and saw the expected ad results for all of those queries.
    - icebraining 15y ago
      It's OK, but I don't use Adblock. I do use NoScript, but all the domains for Google Search are whitelisted.
spolsky 15y ago
OK-doke, here's the last month of Stack Overflow search engine referral traffic. Google 69,081,674 visits Bing 520,543 visits Baidu 319,294 Search (CBS) 176,208 Yahoo 133,833 MSDN 109.875 Yandex 80.399 Naver 89,733 Ask 30,026 DuckDuckGo 25,492 AOL 6,409 Daum 4,462 Blekko 659
- jmdugan 15y ago
  Just keep in mind: People who end up at Stack Overflow are heavily biased compared to the general Internet population - because they are looking for something that lead them to search for and then click a link to Stack Overflow. This same bias that selects the population will affect the choice of which search engine to use.
  - spolsky 15y ago
    Nice theory, but the data doesn't support it. We have other sites (cooking.stackexchange, diy.stackexchange) that are much more representative of the population at large. Even on those sites, you see a similar ratio... the second largest search referrer sends 1.6% as much traffic as Google (about twice as much as it sends to StackOverflow, but still virtually insignificant.)
    - jmdugan 15y ago
      Perhaps the selection bias is some combination of "understands how the Internet works / not willing to accept paid results in searches / looking for real facts and data" that lead users to use both Google and Stack Exchange? Clearly Google has an obvious and overt lead in all categories, and all search. I'm not sure how you can refute that the set of visitors to one site is not a biased sample compared to all Internet users. Your results are different than other published search engine use comparisons. If both are factual, then the measurements must come from different populations.
      - jshen 15y ago
        "Your results are different than other published search engine use comparisons" Link please? The traffic for my site isn't as extreme as the stack exchange, but I'm seeing 9 times more traffic from google than bing. This leads to the same conclusion that Jeff came to. If Bing stopped sending me traffic tomorrow I wouldn't care. If google stopped sending me traffic I'd lose nearly all of my traffic.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

BillSaysThis 15y ago

This blog post is from 2009!!! An in-page search for 2012 gets zero results.

drhayes9 15y ago

I think one reason people aren't sharpening pitchforks and lighting torches is because every other search engine is one click away. Switching search engines is pretty frictionless compared to switching OSes.

earl 15y ago
In theory. Do the nontechnical people in your life even know other search engines exist? I doubt those in mine do.
- dhconnelly 15y ago
  According to Alexa, Yahoo! is the #4 site on the internet, and Windows Live is the #7 site. So the millions of people who have Yahoo! and Windows Live for their homepages (and this is very common--remember that IE is still the dominant browser, and it defaults to Windows Live) are aware of those search engines. The reason Google is the search leader is not because nontechnical people don't know of the alternatives. It's the leader because it's synonymous with search and people think it's the best.
  - ootachi 15y ago
    Google is often set as the default search engine for IE in preinstalled OEM configurations (and frequently these days Chrome is the default browser). For antitrust reasons Microsoft can do nothing about this.
- drhayes9 15y ago
  Heck, I'm not sure most people know what a search engine is. Wasn't "Google" one of the most-often heard answers to the question, "What is a browser?"
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- jonknee 15y ago
  Chrome asks you to choose a default search engine when you install it. What more can they do?

mekoka 15y ago

I'm a little surprised all the people who were so up in arms about the Microsoft "monopoly" ten years ago aren't out in the streets today lighting torches and sharpening their pitchforks to go after Google. Maybe people weren't so up in arms because of Microsoft's monopoly, but rather what they were doing with it. Apple didn't have a monopoly when I stopped being a fan.

epistasis 15y ago
This is precisely it, Microsoft in the 90s did some really abusive and messed up things, for example luring away Borland's key compiler engineers with ridiculous salaries, and then paying them to sit on their thumbs and do nothing [+], in order to give Microsoft's development tools time to catch up. I'm not a huge fan of Google, but if you're a startup you don't fear Google the way you would have feared Microsoft in the 90's. And if you're afraid of Google, it's because of legitimate competition in the marketplace, not nefarious anti-competitive practices. [+] Edit: As pointed out below, the "sitting on their thumbs" may just be local lore, and not true.
- eurleif 15y ago
  >This is precisely it, Microsoft in the 90s did some really abusive and messed up things, for example luring away Borland's key compiler engineers with ridiculous salaries, and then paying them to sit on their thumbs and do nothing, in order to give Microsoft's development tools time to catch up. Why not pay them to build better development tools rather than to sit on their thumbs?
  - epistasis 15y ago
    You know, this was local Santa Cruz lore I'd heard mentioned a couple times, and I couldn't remember the details, so perhaps they are embellished stories by the Borland employees that stayed. Here's an old CNET article about a related lawsuit: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-279561.html http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-279561.html "Yocam maintains that Microsoft is luring personnel away with huge signing bonuses, some in excess of $1 million."

martian 15y ago

Noting that this article is from 2009, I think it makes some valid points. By owning people's entry to the internet, Google has a monopoly. But I don't think it's so much a monopoly on search that's interesting, as it is a monopoly on entry. Google is everyone's front door to the Internet. There are a few geeks like us who know about URLs and TLDs, but generally people just google what they're looking for. And on that note, I think there are other monopolistic gates to the internet being opened. Like the portals of old, Facebook is setting itself up to be the other Front Door on the Internet. Part of that is wrapped in what people care about most: other people. So it makes sense that you go to Google for things, places, and ideas; and you go to Facebook for people. Google realized it was missing that category of nouns and built Google+. Facebook knows it's missing a lot beyond people and is looking to expand into other nounish categories, but it's also looking to expand into verbs: listen, watch, read. I don't think Google has a monopoly forever -- I think it's fighting tooth and nail to stay at the top. I think there is fierce competition going on at all levels here, Facebook being the obvious example. And let's not forget Apple, Comcast, and other media providers who are using their control of media experiences to leverage control over people's experience of the Internet. The future is going to be interesting!

jmduke 15y ago

Okay, am I missing something? Microsoft wasn't a monopoly because their software pervaded rampantly; Microsoft was a monopoly because their entire business model bastardized the notion of vertical integration by making alternate software (ie competition) impossible, furthered by the costs of developing IE being (allegedly) baked into Windows. Is the "Google = Monopoly" argument that their bundling of GMail/Search/Plus/etc./etc. is discouraging competition?

jerf 15y ago
Yes, you're missing something, but it's a common thing to miss. What's illegal and immoral isn't the mere possession of a monopoly. What's illegal and immoral is the abuse of a monopoly position to shut out competition, corner the market, then raise prices above what a free market would bear. Microsoft was a monopoly because they sold 95+% of the operating systems on computers. Microsoft was convicted not of being a monopoly, but of abusing the monopoly. It is also interesting to observe that while Microsoft may have done some immoral things to obtain that monopoly (depending on how you look at it), that doesn't make the things they did before they had a monopoly illegal, or at least not for reasons of having a monopoly. Special scrutiny and rules are put in place for monopolists. Thus, it became illegal to bundle IE with Windows in some places, but that was a special ruling for MS only as a consequence of their monopoly status, it was not a general legal restriction against bundling. The claim that Google is a monopoly on search is simply an observation that they are servicing the vast, vast majority of searches. It does not logically follow that they are doing anything wrong; that is something that must be established separately. I for one don't see much evidence for Google abusing their monopoly in illegal or immoral ways. (Most of my complaints would center more around resting on their laurels, such as with their notoriously bad customer service, but there's nothing particularly illegal or immoral about that....) It is also valid to be personally concerned about the presence of a monopoly, even if it is not doing anything particularly wrong. The common category collapse of "monopoly" and "illegal monopoly" makes it hard to understand what's really going on.
mdasen 15y ago
Microsoft was a monopoly in the operating system market because they had near exclusive control of that market. Likewise, Google has near exclusive control of the search market. The term "monopoly" doesn't require abuse. I think the point of the article is to say that Google isn't abusing their monopoly power (by many people's standards), but that Google is nonetheless a monopoly and if they delist your site or otherwise abuse their power, you no longer exist as a viable business. We even have a recent example of this in the spat between Twitter and Google over Google+ results in search. Google is hiding behind the "you put 'nofollow' on them" line, but it seems a tad dishonest. Really, "nofollow" gets used to say "don't give them SEO points for this link". Even if one considers Google's position completely legitimate, it's also quite handy for Google. Now their Google+ service gets promoted over a competitor. Google's decision here is a use of their position to hurt a competitor. In fact, it's a lot like the Netscape situation. There's legitimacy to not indexing the Twitter content labeled with "nofollow" or integrating your own competitor right into your product. This is the same argument that Microsoft used about Internet Explorer. When a company has 10% of the market, we don't need to scrutinize so much. They don't have a lot of power. When a company controls such a high proportion of an industry, that changes. The author rightly identifies that if Google moves against you in their search index, it basically eliminates your business. There are always reasons. I'm glad about the moves Google has made against spammers in their index recently. However, when looking at the Twitter situation, I feel less positively. I personally don't use Twitter (or Google+), but I can recognize that Google's market dominance in search is going to hurt Twitter and promote their own competitor. Google+ may be better and there may be good technological reasons for the integration and the non-indexing of Twitter links, but when you're as dominant of search as Google is, I think a bit more scrutiny is warranted. Likewise, when Microsoft was so dominant of operating systems and started integrating their own browser into the OS, it was scrutinized. That doesn't mean there wasn't good technological reasons for the integration, just that Microsoft was of a size where it eliminates the viability of competitors. I have a lot of respect for Google and none of this is meant to sound anti-Google. At the same time, I agree with the author's premise that Google is so dominant of search that they could eliminate the viability of your business via their search index. That doesn't mean that they would do that. However, I think it means that certain moves should be viewed as being made by the only company in the industry - not one made by a single company among many competitors. And before one says "there's lots of alternatives like Bing, DDG, etc.", Microsoft had Apple, Be, Linux, and others, but they still held the power. The article isn't saying that Google is abusing their monopoly, just that they do have that power.

rorrr 15y ago

Here are the numbers for one of my sites, not related to IT in any way: Google 94.3% Yahoo 2.6% Bing 1.8% Yandex 0.63% Ask 0.37% AOL 0.23% EDIT: Here's another non-IT site with 13 million monthly visits: Google 89.9% Yahoo 6.4% Bing 2.96% Ask 0.37% AOL 0.21% Yandex 0.12%

whatusername 15y ago
So my 2011 figures (for a site for English Speaking SF/Fantasy fans) are about GOOG: 95% / Bing: 3% / Yahoo 2%

eslaught 15y ago

> But where's the healthy competition? Where's the incentive for Google to improve? People here might not like this answer, but honestly, Facebook. Look at Google+. You can like it or not, but it's clear that it's the biggest change to Google's product in a while.

ok_craig 15y ago

I'm really interested in hearing how people think this problem should be fixed, since Google having such a large market share is necessarily a bad thing. I see a lot of criticism, but no solution offering. But it's implied in all the anti-Google comments that either Google needs to stop making its product better, or it needs to be forcefully hampered by the government. Is this a correct assessment? If not, what are the alternatives?

sdrinf 15y ago
One alternative might be celebrating startups, and entrepreneurs, who publicly declare (pro- or retroactively) refusing acquisitions -from Google, or otherwise. One of the non-obvious consequences of this monopoly is all the other ways by which you could've navigated the Internet, that has been bought, paid for, then rapidly shut down by Google. Note there are many other ways you can acquire information that is relevant, and timely for you -social&topical communities, Q&A sites&channels, decision trees are but a few- it just happens that search got an early start on the R&D economies of scale.
- ok_craig 15y ago
  I can get behind your first suggestion. Social influence can be huge, and it doesn't require a legal club to beat a company down with. Do you think it's necessarily a bad thing when smaller companies get bought by Google? What you don't mention in the case that all startups refuse a buyout is that the #1 search product improves at a much slower rate. Their technology may be interesting and useful, but in itself not enough to draw consumers, while if it were integrated into a larger product, it could bring that new technology to many more people much more quickly. Do we gain more by using technologies as individual products than we do by using them as parts of a larger, integrated whole? Probably sometimes we do. But always? I can't say I'm familiar with all the things you mention in your last point. But if I knew about all of them, understood their purpose and what value they served, do you think I would use them all? I feel like I would probably just type a Google search, which could potentially search all of those for me. I know social, I know Q&A - it doesn't really seem to me that with just those services, I would have a set of tools as powerful as Google itself. I use them on occasion, but for specific things. Search engines are general purpose question answerers - it seems like this is why they're more popular. I think if all of those services were out first, and then Google came along, it'd still be the most powerful and grow to be huger, because in general, it's more useful.

chrischen 15y ago

Google doesn't lock people into its search. People have a choice and they obviously choose Google.

waterlesscloud 15y ago
People had a choice regarding Windows in the 90s.
Kliment 15y ago
Website authors don't have a choice though. It's be on google or don't exist.
- chrischen 15y ago
  That's not Google's fault. Google made a better product and consumers freely chose this. If Google arrives at a monopoly because of building a better product there is nothing wrong with this, but if Google arrives at a monopoly through manipulation and anti-competitive practices and then further using that monopoly position to sustain the monopoly then that's wrong.

cpeterso 15y ago

Any suggestions from people who have switched from Google to another search engine? I switched from Google to DuckDuckGo, but I gave up after a few days. DuckDuckGo's results were very good for popular/mainstream terms, but Google is much better at deep "needle in haystack" searches. I later switched from Google to Bing, but I gave up after one day. Bing's results were very random and stale. And Bing is ugly. :)

guard-of-terra 15y ago
Give Yandex a try. The results would be stale too but at least it looks nice.
BCM43 15y ago
I switched from Google to DuckDuckGo, but I gave up after a few days. DuckDuckGo's results were very good for popular/mainstream terms, but Google is much better at deep "needle in haystack" searches. When was this? It's gotten a lot better for me.
white_devil 15y ago
You could always just use DDG by default, and then resort to Google only when you really need it. That's what I've been doing for 1 - 2 years now.

bad_user 15y ago

The other Elephant in the room - with rich Javascript interfaces, crawlers are only feasible to build if you have enough resources - i.e. only companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are able to do it. Web pages are becoming increasingly less accessible and Google has a lot to gain by this trend. The writing on the wall is pretty clear - Google has a monopoly in search and the only way they can be disrupted is through alternative means of finding content (like social networks). Which is why, as much as I like them and their products, I find the integration with Google+ downright scary and dangerous for the health of our ecosystem.

nostrademons 15y ago
That's not really true - John Resig hooked Rhino up to a good-enough DOM model in a weekend: http://ejohn.org/blog/bringing-the-browser-to-the-server/ http://ejohn.org/blog/bringing-the-browser-to-the-server/ No, you're not going to match Google's crawling infrastructure or data extraction libraries. But if you just want to grab pages off the web, parse them, and handle JavaScript from those pages correctly, you can easily rig something up between Mechanize/html5lib/V8 or Nutch/Tika/Rhino.
- bad_user 15y ago
  Crawling a couple of pages is different from crawling the entire web on a recurring basis. It was hard enough without the emergence of Javascript-enabled pages.

west13 15y ago

I haven't looked at every comment to see if anyone has stated the obvious: search is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more data you have, the better your results. The better your results, the more data you get. No one will make up ground on Google until a radical new algorithm is invented, and Google doesn't buy it :)

resnamen 15y ago
I don't think it's a matter of data access. I would argue that Bing has parity with Google in most respects (they have the same Internet to crawl, partnerships with some data providers for things like flight search, etc.), and they even have decisive advantages in other areas, like access to huge piles of social data. So why aren't they as good or better?

bishnu 15y ago

I mean the difference is that a search engine is a search engine - it's not a platform a whole bunch of people need to be using to be more effective. Ditching Microsoft in the 90s meant ditching Office, the best selection of games, etc. Whereas every other search engine works just as well (potentially) as Google search.

mbesto 15y ago

Let's be clear first on what Google's product is and what it's selling. Google's product is pageviews (or eyes). It sources these pageviews effectively for free (from you and I) and sells them to companies. The end-user who does the search is a marginal piece of the product that Google is selling. Therefore you can't say Google has a monopoly on search, because there is no market for search, since no one is paying for a product called search. edit:spelling

phear 15y ago

http://mashable.com/2012/01/12/bing-overtakes-yahoo/...The http://mashable.com/2012/01/12/bing-overtakes-yahoo/...The latest from mashable. Google still waaay ahead in 1st place. Notable is that when Bing first came out many blogs were talking about what was wrong with it and why it would die. They've slowly come a logn way(helped in part by Yahoo's problems). Do they have what it takes to be the thorn in google's flesh that xbox is in Sony's?

tzury 15y ago

That is a must I would say in our era. See, given one of the fundamentals in the Unix philosophical idiom is Make each program do one thing well. In an era of Software as a Service, it is Make each service do one thing well.