3 ms·

This feels like the same vein as Microsoft abusing it's monopoly to distribute IE in the 90s. I don't know what Microsoft's market share was back then (seems ar

This feels like the same vein as Microsoft abusing it's monopoly to distribute IE in the 90s. I don't know what Microsoft's market share was back then (seems around 75% according to [1]), but Google's is around 68% [2] at the moment which puts them in a pretty good position to drive traffic wherever they feel like. Some might say this is their prerogative, but the same argument could have been made for Microsoft back then. Since Bing is doing the same thing[3], we have the two major search engines both potentially killing off song lyric sites and the businesses behind them. Whether this is ok or not is not as interesting as where all these structured data additions will take us. Will it see the death of curated content sites (like the lyric sites) in favor of the search behemoths having their own content databases, or will we see a resurgence of these sorts of sites with new ways to discover them? [1] http://news.cnet.com/Windows-95-remains-most-popular-operating-system/2100-1040_3-228773.html http://news.cnet.com/Windows-95-remains-most-popular-operati... [2] http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/study/2345837/google-search-engine-market-share-nears-68 http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/study/2345837/google-search... [3] http://searchengineland.com/bing-starts-showing-full-song-lyrics-right-search-results-205050 http://searchengineland.com/bing-starts-showing-full-song-ly...

adventured 12y ago
Microsoft's desktop market share by 1998 was 90%+. Here's an amazing press release by Microsoft (reprinted newspaper article), acknowledging it (when they were still trying to defend their success rather than redirect the message off of it): http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/ofnote/9-16mrktshare.mspx http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/ofnote/9-16mrktshare.mspx This move by Google is in the vein of Microsoft eating its ecosystem, which is something every dominate platform will always do to some degree. That predates the Internet Explorer bundling. Over the span of two decades Microsoft either purchased or built into Windows, dozens of products that used to exist stand-alone. Google will do exactly the same thing, and they will increasingly take flak for it. Google let everyone know they were going to do this, many years ago. Any simple data / facts / snippets they can provide that act as fast answers to common queries, they will build into the top of results.
alfiedotwtf 12y ago
Not sure why this isn't the top comment. I'm glad others are thinking about this.

adventured 12y ago

Microsoft's desktop market share by 1998 was 90%+. Here's an amazing press release by Microsoft (reprinted newspaper article), acknowledging it (when they were still trying to defend their success rather than redirect the message off of it): http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/ofnote/9-16mrktshare.mspx http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/ofnote/9-16mrktshare.mspx This move by Google is in the vein of Microsoft eating its ecosystem, which is something every dominate platform will always do to some degree. That predates the Internet Explorer bundling. Over the span of two decades Microsoft either purchased or built into Windows, dozens of products that used to exist stand-alone. Google will do exactly the same thing, and they will increasingly take flak for it. Google let everyone know they were going to do this, many years ago. Any simple data / facts / snippets they can provide that act as fast answers to common queries, they will build into the top of results.

alfiedotwtf 12y ago

Not sure why this isn't the top comment. I'm glad others are thinking about this.