If Google's rivals are being unfairly treated by Google's search results, then they should make their own search engines that are fair. Yes, I understand Google has an advantage by having a head start, but that hasn't stopped for example Facebook from overthrowing MySpace for social networking. A rival company with a better idea or better results could challenge or even defeat Google without getting even more government involvement in the internet.
People voluntarily choose to use Google, at least on deskt
google doesn't just have a head start, they have a monopoly position, once you are a monopoly the rules of fairness change and it isn't enough to simply say someone can start their own business.
That's for the courts to decide. As long as they're not abusing their monopoly for gains into other areas like Microsoft, it's not a problem. The real issue with google is that they're in this position because they're the only ones that got search right (even if it's getting worse year on year), no one else comes close, where rivals even resort to scraping google behind the scenes.
Yes, but unlike traditional monopoly, there's no cost of switching and no cost of entry. If you are the only person selling burgers in the world, you can bully your suppliers not to sell to anyone else, you can price your competition out of business, you can buy up sites and not use.
None of those things apply on the internet. If I found another search engine that worked better than Google, I'd switch tomorrow. So far, no dice.
The trouble is in this instance, is that the people who have the decision making power (you, in this instance) aren't the same as the people who are being abused (the provider of the thing you're searching for). To say that it's okay because you have the power to change what you do, doesn't change the fact that you won't change because you're not the one being screwed.
So, umm.. what are they doing wrong? The search results are from an algorithm. If your product doesn't show up it's not as important from the algorithms point of view. If I make a catalog that lists local businesses, and them some of them end up on the backpage because I have to sort them somehow what am I doing wrong? They can't all be the first.
Have you tried Ring the Fing A? Or just the summary? They insert ads for their own services above your search results, leading us into using them rather than a rival who may or may not be just as good.
Um, aren't literally all of their search ads above the search results? Why should they exclude their services from advertising in the same exact spot as everyone else who would be buying ads?
Except this is not just an ad. It's not a few lines inside a beige box marked "sponsored results". Go to Google and type in "map of Europe" or "map of China" or whatever place on Earth you want. Before any traditional search results, you will see a big box showing the Google Maps map of your chosen location. The complaint is that they've embedded their webapps inside the search engine, leveraging their monopolistic position in search to get users onto Google apps instead of competitors' offerings.
Except that it doesn't work that way. Serving search results, indexing and caching needs servers. Servers has a cost. Google subsidizes that cost from their advertisement service.
Relatively speaking - computing power is cheap these days. You can build a server with more computing power of Google's first server farm for a few thousand dollars. You can virtualize everything and rent CPU power from Amazon or Rackspace or Microsoft. If you're working out of your garage you can start up a new search engine for a couple tens of thousands of dollars which, really, is hardly anything these days.
Google is the only entity in the world that has the history of the web stored. Without this history, proper search result ranking is next to impossible.
I don't think you or the other commenters really know this area. I have worked on web search engines for many years, also in Google.
archive.org has nothing. Google is to archive.org as archive.org is to my browser cache. Even if archive.org had something, it's not available to a new entrant.
A search engine is not so much about sifting through large sets of data quickly, but which signals you can use to score and rank the hits. When there is a monopoly on these signals, there is no amount of capital, fi
Do you seriously think finding a few old geocities pages on archive.org refutes what I'm saying?
Well, yes, because it sounds like Khyber chose an arbitrary, non-remarkable website, looked it up on archive.org, and it was there. Not conclusive, by any means, but it certainly counts for something.
I was talking about the user, but actually, the startup cost of a new search engine is pretty low. There is very little cost to running your own web spider, basically a few bucks [semantics3.com] a day for several million pages. Of course you have to buy the expertise to run and tune it but in startup terms these are not exactly ridiculous. Google obviously has a depth of expertise that would be difficult to match but I don't think it's impossible to compete with them if you're sufficiently determined.
Google obviously has a depth of expertise that would be difficult to match but I don't think it's impossible to compete with them if you're sufficiently determined.
This isn't hypothetical: see Bing, and Baidu.
According to Bing, Bing is at least as good as Google in blind-tests. Whether that's really true, I don't know. I admit I don't use Bing - the reason is that unless Bing is really better than Google, why switch? That said, it costs me nothing to switch. Maybe it's just a matter of 'trust'.
Not sure if I support the EU here (don't know enough about the details).
But this doesn't apply to you using Google to search or your ability to create a new search engine or switch search engines.
Google is the dominant search engine. The complaint is about how Google leverages it "monopoly" in search to position itself more favorably against other people/companies search results. e.g. Let's say Google sold watches, and always listed it's watches more favorably over other companies who sold watches. It would
There is a massive cost of entry and a massive cost of switching, we aren't talking about web users who can switch search engines, we are talking about businesses that need to advertise their services, switching to another service means they don't get the exposure and advertising they need to survive as google has a monopoly on the advertising industry, building your own service would cost billions as you need to gain a foothold to make your advertising have some value, to do so would likely cost 10's of bi
It's not a monopoly. Switching search engines is free. It's not like Microsoft where it's (almost) impossible for you to buy a computer without it, and replacing windows is getting more difficult each passing year. And on desktops, Google is a voluntary choice, and even on android, you can change the default search engine, or simply set your home page to yahoo or bing if you'd like.
It's not a monopoly. Switching search engines is free.
Netscape was free too, and it was easy to switch from IE for anyone who wanted to... And yet MS was rightly convicted.
Never overerestimate the inability of ordinary people from doing the most basic things. You may think it's trivial to switch search engines, but for most people it isn't. And antitrust is all about bringing about a good outcome for most people, not for people like you or me who can take care of ourselves.
Not everyone would agree the conviction was wise or necessary. IE's share was trending down long before that point. For those people who don't even know what search engine they are using, there's no point giving them a choice or forcing a choice (or random selection) on them, because they are clearly not experiencing sufficient detriment to know or care there's an issue. They can switch from MySpace when they want to, so suggesting they need someone to hold their hands to switch search engine is patronis
Netscape was free too, and it was easy to switch from IE for anyone who wanted to...
Netscape wasn't free until Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer (IE) into Windows, which had (and still has) a (what should be illegal) monopoly on desktop operating systems. At that point, no one could charge for a browser. That was leveraging a monopoly in one area to gain a monopoly in another area, which is a felony (for which Microsoft was rightly convicted).
Switching from IE to anything else was almost impossible for most people, because Microsoft's browser dominance was so thorough that a huge numbe
Netscape was free too, and it was easy to switch from IE for anyone who wanted to... And yet MS was rightly convicted.
For most parts, IE4+ was better than Netscape and people would have chosen it even when given a fair choice. In fact, Microsoft may have played dirty but they still had the overall best browser. Only with Firefox we started to have serious competition. Opera was very good too but it wasn't free at the time.
And now, the IE market-share is declining and I don't think it is because of some stupid ballot screen (it started earlier). It is just that there are now better alternatives.
Other search engines are crap. Google works because they invest massive amounts of money and time into making it harder to game their search results. Even then they don't necessarily seem to be winning that battle. For example, a lot of web dev terms will give you results from W3Fools instead of actually useful resources such as MDN, MSDN, Apple Developers, Stack Overflow, the actual WHATWG (or even W3C) spec, etc. It's so bad that I have a browser extension installed just to delete W3Schools garbage from m
I just asked myself... what would John DeLorean do?
-- Raoul Duke
Again? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Again? (Score:3, Informative)
google doesn't just have a head start, they have a monopoly position, once you are a monopoly the rules of fairness change and it isn't enough to simply say someone can start their own business.
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Redundant comment in support of parent posts viewpoint. Moving on.
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That is not what redundant means though.
Re: Again? (Score:0)
Seriously? The parent and the reply disagree with each other last time I checked.
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That's for the courts to decide. As long as they're not abusing their monopoly for gains into other areas like Microsoft, it's not a problem. The real issue with google is that they're in this position because they're the only ones that got search right (even if it's getting worse year on year), no one else comes close, where rivals even resort to scraping google behind the scenes.
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The whole point of this case is that they ARE ABUSING there monopoly position.
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None of those things apply on the internet. If I found another search engine that worked better than Google, I'd switch tomorrow. So far, no dice.
Re:Again? (Score:4, Interesting)
The trouble is in this instance, is that the people who have the decision making power (you, in this instance) aren't the same as the people who are being abused (the provider of the thing you're searching for). To say that it's okay because you have the power to change what you do, doesn't change the fact that you won't change because you're not the one being screwed.
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So, umm.. what are they doing wrong? The search results are from an algorithm. If your product doesn't show up it's not as important from the algorithms point of view. If I make a catalog that lists local businesses, and them some of them end up on the backpage because I have to sort them somehow what am I doing wrong? They can't all be the first.
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I do not see these other people as having a right to have their stuff shoved in front of my face to the exclusion of Google.
They can pay for ad space, maybe Google puts Google ads up there, too. Otherwise fight for page rankings like everyone else.
If Google is claiming fair rankings and bitchslapping competitors down in the normal (not paid) search results, that's fraud.
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Except that it doesn't work that way. Serving search results, indexing and caching needs servers. Servers has a cost. Google subsidizes that cost from their advertisement service.
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Relatively speaking - computing power is cheap these days. You can build a server with more computing power of Google's first server farm for a few thousand dollars. You can virtualize everything and rent CPU power from Amazon or Rackspace or Microsoft. If you're working out of your garage you can start up a new search engine for a couple tens of thousands of dollars which, really, is hardly anything these days.
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"no cost of entry"
Google is the only entity in the world that has the history of the web stored. Without this history, proper search result ranking is next to impossible.
The "cost of entry" is astronomical.
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The "cost of entry" is astronomical.
I think what u38cg meant was that there's no cost to a person using the search-engine, to switch search-engine.
Of course it costs millions to start your own search-engine.
Google is the only entity in the world that has the history of the web stored
Wrong. [archive.org]
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I don't think you or the other commenters really know this area. I have worked on web search engines for many years, also in Google.
archive.org has nothing. Google is to archive.org as archive.org is to my browser cache. Even if archive.org had something, it's not available to a new entrant.
A search engine is not so much about sifting through large sets of data quickly, but which signals you can use to score and rank the hits. When there is a monopoly on these signals, there is no amount of capital, fi
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"archive.org has nothing."
Which is why I can find my old geocities pages and even download some of the old files from my page, eh?
Google's cached content can't even do that half of the time.
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And global warming doesn't exist because today it was really cold.
Do you seriously think finding a few old geocities pages on archive.org refutes what I'm saying?
You know what, I can find an old slashdot page in my web browser cache.
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Do you seriously think finding a few old geocities pages on archive.org refutes what I'm saying?
Well, yes, because it sounds like Khyber chose an arbitrary, non-remarkable website, looked it up on archive.org, and it was there. Not conclusive, by any means, but it certainly counts for something.
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Google obviously has a depth of expertise that would be difficult to match but I don't think it's impossible to compete with them if you're sufficiently determined.
This isn't hypothetical: see Bing, and Baidu.
According to Bing, Bing is at least as good as Google in blind-tests. Whether that's really true, I don't know. I admit I don't use Bing - the reason is that unless Bing is really better than Google, why switch? That said, it costs me nothing to switch. Maybe it's just a matter of 'trust'.
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Not sure if I support the EU here (don't know enough about the details).
But this doesn't apply to you using Google to search or your ability to create a new search engine or switch search engines.
Google is the dominant search engine. The complaint is about how Google leverages it "monopoly" in search to position itself more favorably against other people/companies search results. e.g. Let's say Google sold watches, and always listed it's watches more favorably over other companies who sold watches. It would
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There is a massive cost of entry and a massive cost of switching, we aren't talking about web users who can switch search engines, we are talking about businesses that need to advertise their services, switching to another service means they don't get the exposure and advertising they need to survive as google has a monopoly on the advertising industry, building your own service would cost billions as you need to gain a foothold to make your advertising have some value, to do so would likely cost 10's of bi
Re: Again? (Score:0)
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Netscape was free too, and it was easy to switch from IE for anyone who wanted to... And yet MS was rightly convicted.
Never overerestimate the inability of ordinary people from doing the most basic things. You may think it's trivial to switch search engines, but for most people it isn't. And antitrust is all about bringing about a good outcome for most people, not for people like you or me who can take care of ourselves.
So no, switching search engi
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How could it possibly be hard? Instead of going to www.google.com, you go to www.startpage.com, or www.mynewawesomesearch.com.
There's nothing to "do" beyond what you do every day to visit a web page. That's the whole point of the web.
Re: Again? (Score:0)
There are still folks out there who think the internet is the big blue e, lol. These dumb fucks use bing lmfao.
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Netscape was free too, and it was easy to switch from IE for anyone who wanted to...
Netscape wasn't free until Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer (IE) into Windows, which had (and still has) a (what should be illegal) monopoly on desktop operating systems. At that point, no one could charge for a browser. That was leveraging a monopoly in one area to gain a monopoly in another area, which is a felony (for which Microsoft was rightly convicted).
Switching from IE to anything else was almost impossible for most people, because Microsoft's browser dominance was so thorough that a huge numbe
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Netscape was free too, and it was easy to switch from IE for anyone who wanted to... And yet MS was rightly convicted.
For most parts, IE4+ was better than Netscape and people would have chosen it even when given a fair choice.
In fact, Microsoft may have played dirty but they still had the overall best browser. Only with Firefox we started to have serious competition. Opera was very good too but it wasn't free at the time.
And now, the IE market-share is declining and I don't think it is because of some stupid ballot screen (it started earlier). It is just that there are now better alternatives.
Competition work well in this
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When you are searching, switching search engines is free.
When you are being searched, switching search engines is not generally possible.
This case is about being searched.
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Other search engines are crap. Google works because they invest massive amounts of money and time into making it harder to game their search results. Even then they don't necessarily seem to be winning that battle. For example, a lot of web dev terms will give you results from W3Fools instead of actually useful resources such as MDN, MSDN, Apple Developers, Stack Overflow, the actual WHATWG (or even W3C) spec, etc. It's so bad that I have a browser extension installed just to delete W3Schools garbage from m