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The first week of US v. Google – Defaults are everything and nobody likes Bing
- nathias 3y agoGoogle's strategy has been obvious for decades, slowly become the infrastructure, make yourself into a dependancy and then start to squeeze out profits. Too bad corporations won and monopolies aren't broken up anymore.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- seeknotfind 3y agoEven though Bing was made the default search for Windows start menu, I don't use it much.
- Galanwe 3y agoYou should start your comment with "As a top 5% computer-literate HN reader". To my parents, double clicking on "Internet Explorer" means "opening the internet".
- lucb1e 3y agoI sure hope not. What OS version are they running?!
- psunavy03 3y agoThis is not unusual; my 70-something dad still runs an ancient Windows 7 machine.
- seeknotfind 3y agoTaking this to mean, Bing has still achieved significant market share via start menu integration. Yeah.
- hot_gril 3y agoChrome's market share alone is a lot more than 5%.
- Galanwe 3y agoGetting a meaningful market share of browser usage is very hard. First, because most statistics are based on self reported user agent metrics from the top websites. But my parents don't go to Reddit, PornHub, YouTube or LinkedIn, etc. Second, culturally speaking, I don't think we have accurate reporting of non-western websites. I bet most of China, India and Russia websites don't care about reporting their metrics publicly. And last, internet usage distribution is very skewed. I myself probably generate 1000x more internet traffic as my parents, so I probably count as 1000x more market share than them. Yet, in terms of "users", I would count the same as they do.
- hot_gril 3y agoIt's not ideal, but given how easy it is to fingerprint devices, they probably don't count you 1000x.
- Tyr42 3y agoThat sounds like you're prompting an AI there.
- AlbertCory 3y ago> Schmidtlein has derided the excerpts as cherry-picked and “out of context.” "out of context" is the standard BS answer to anything. "What context, exactly, is missing?" should be the followup question. Odd that they don't mention that Sridhar Ramaswamy is not merely the "founder of Neeva" but he was head of Google AdWords for almost 10 years! I guess you can't expect these reporters to read their own site. https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/20/23731397/neeva-search-engine-google-shutdown https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/20/23731397/neeva-search-eng...
- bawolff 3y ago> "out of context" is the standard BS answer to anything. "What context, exactly, is missing?" should be the followup question. Quoting things out of context is also the standard BS way to smear someone. In any case, i agree that the person asking the questions should expect this response. If they're prepared for that response and the quote really wasn't taken out of context, it shouldn't be too hard to make the person using it look like an idiot.
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoThe problem with all of this is that it's a performance. Google does something actually anti-competitive, but it's subtle and requires a thorough understanding of industry dynamics to fully understand. But one of their employees said something that sounds bad, so guess what the headline is. Whether the quote was taken out of context or not isn't even the interesting question, because it's independent of whether they're actually doing something wrong. The quote could be completely in context and the employee was a fool who didn't know what they were talking about, or it could be completely out of context even though they actually did the bad thing.
- Aunche 3y agoWhat exactly is so hard to understand? It's a well known fact that they pay to be the default search engine. Either that's against the rules or it is not. It sounds like the DOJ doesn't want to be blamed for any potential negative consequences for establishing clear rules, so instead they'll bully Google into settling so that they can get an easy win.
- candiddevmike 3y agoSurprised there's not much coverage on this on HN. I suspect this is the first of many legal cases against the tech empires, and if this goes south you may be able to conclude the rest will as well. How much power and influence can Google buy (absolute best attorneys, call in favors...) vs the power of the US government? If the US government can't do anything, what does that mean?
- AlbertCory 3y agoIt's not very dramatic, so far. Compare to David Boies making Gates look like an arrogant little dweeb, as he did in 1998.
- ndesaulniers 3y agoGot a link?
- AlbertCory 3y agoJust search YouTube. They're all there.
- tiffanyh 3y agoPlot twist, you have to use a Google product to find & watch the video.
- Mistletoe 3y agoGates looking like an arrogant little dweeb will have a lot of results.
- AlbertCory 3y agoso you need instructions on how to search?
- 3y ago
- ralph84 3y agoIt’s all so ridiculous. Microsoft got nailed for talking about beating the competition. They’re trying to nail Google for training employees to not talk about beating the competition. What is competition supposed to be if it’s not beating the competition. Just have extremely progressive taxation on companies as they get larger and stop approving megamergers if you believe large companies are harmful.
- edgyquant 3y agoI don’t think “progressive tax on companies as they get larger,” would be at all helpful. For one thing companies can skirt this with subsidiaries but also there are capital intensive industries where such a system could punish the average company. I agree they shouldn’t allow mergers, this should be very rare and there should have to be a very good case for it, but also just breaking up companies should be a lot more normal. I also agree there has to be some kind of answer based on company profit, but I think that taxation is not the best answer. It would be much better if there was a way to funnel that money into R&D at other companies and even industries; but admittedly I have no idea how such a system would work or if it’s even possible. Just sounds good in my head.
- trimistermota 3y agoTaxes funds public R&D which it's used by all companies
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago> What is competition supposed to be if it’s not beating the competition. It's supposed to be fair. Microsoft didn't get nailed because they were winning, they got nailed because they were winning by abusing one monopoly to try and create another.
- lazide 3y agoBwahaha. Since when is business, or hell life in general fair? Maybe ‘not doing illegal things’ should be the bar? At least they’re written down in advance (hopefully) instead of retroactively defined by folks who didn’t win?
- mkoubaa 3y agoBing and Google search are equally awful at finding what I need and I hope they both become irrelevant.
- romusha 3y agoYep. These days I use multiple tools to find what I need
- endisneigh 3y agoWhy do you hope they’re irrelevant? I hope they become better
- geraldwhen 3y agoThey get worse as time goes on. I’ve never seen them get better.
- gsich 3y agoSeeing at how non-tech people use Google I doubt that. Also cancerous SEO sites (with affiliate links) pop up all the time if you search for product info or comparison.
- lxnn 3y agoI hope they are out-competed by a better alternative.
- owlninja 3y agoAnd we strike them down for being too good?
- tjpnz 3y agoTry searching for a quote from an obscure show you watched when you were young. Not long ago Google would return pages of results. These days it's likely to return none.
- rvz 3y agoMozilla is in a rock and a hard place since their #1 revenue source is getting scrutinised with a significant anti-trust suit in decades. We need to admit that not even a new so-called AI tool called ChatGPT could compete and make a dent on Google's 90% market share [0] as a 'search engine' [1]. The new Bing made no significant change to challenge Google [2][3] and Neeva (by former Google employees) believed they could challenge them and failed. [4] No contest on competition since there is little to no competition against Google in search. [0] https://www.similarweb.com/engines/ https://www.similarweb.com/engines/ [1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-traffic-slips-again-third-month-row-2023-09-07/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-traffic-slips-aga... [2] https://searchengineland.com/new-bing-google-market-share-six-months-430840 https://searchengineland.com/new-bing-google-market-share-si... [3] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/microsoft-bing-search-artificial-intelligence-google-competition-6e51ec04 https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/microsoft-bing-search-artificial... [4] https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/20/23731397/neeva-search-engine-google-shutdown https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/20/23731397/neeva-search-eng...
- amf12 3y agoNeeva also failed because of their business model. Turns out, not many people want to "pay for search".
- lolinder 3y agoMozilla needs to outgrow its dependence on Google anyway—it cannot effectively guard against Chrome's monopoly in the browser space while being wholly dependent on Google, any more than Google can be a good search engine while being wholly dependent on ads—the monetary incentives are off. Give me a Firefox subscription and I'll pay for it in a heartbeat.
- daft_pink 3y agoI would love to switch search engines, but no matter what when I switch my browser to bing or duckduckgo, I always find myself back at google. Especially recently as with their anti-privacy policies, I would really prefer to use a different service, but they really are the best.
- dustingetz 3y agokagi.com
- pdlozano 3y agoThe nice thing about DDG is that you can always use !g to go to Google. But even after using them for years, I still find myself using !g 30-40% of the time.
- desi_ninja 3y agoTyping !g is added inconvenience on mobile
- daft_pink 3y agoWow thanks, that is useful!
- lolinder 3y agoI can second Kagi. Paid search is the only model that isn't going to end up awful in the end, and Kagi is far better than Google already. Recently discussed on HN is the feature to block and boost domains, which is the feature I find makes the biggest difference in their results: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37006082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37006082
- Spivak 3y agoI don't think free/paid is the thing that will stop the decline because the downfall is adversarial input. If Kagi got huge people would start trying to SEO against them and they would end up like Google. Because I really don't think Google is bad because of the ads, it's bad because people desperately want their shitty site to be the first organic result rather than pay for the ad spot. Having a huge behemoth that competitors like Kagi can fly under the radar with might be the only way for any search engine to maintain quality.
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoI have to say I'm disappointed with the focus on defaults here. Defaults are important, but they're also mostly a bidding war. It's not like Microsoft has no money. The real issue is the tying. They build this conglomerated system that all comes together as one blob, and get third parties to depend on various parts of it to prevent them from being swapped out individually. Then to replace one of them you have to be able to replace the others, which makes it very hard for any but the largest corporations to compete. Capturing the search default on Android is a tiny piece of what they do with it, and the part that would barely make any difference to the search market when the alternative would be that they just pay for it. Or let people choose them, since that's the market where they have the strongest brand and it's all the ancillary markets that they might not have dominated where the consequences are greater. And then they wouldn't have to deal with this: > The question that matters most, though, is whether Judge Mehta can be convinced that consumer harm applies to free products like search engines. Because they could get them for the 30% cut on Google Play. Advertising isn't a dissimilar tack when you cast the advertiser as the customer, but then you're stuck trying to prove that Google wouldn't have had a dominant search engine without doing this, when they had one before doing this.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fallingknife 3y ago> They build this conglomerated system that all comes together as one blob, and get third parties to depend on various parts of it to prevent them from being swapped out individually. Then to replace one of them you have to be able to replace the others, which makes it very hard for any but the largest corporations to compete. The case doesn't focus on this because it's not illegal. There are definite benefits to the user in terms of convenience here. And building a product that people want more is not anti-competitive behavior just because it requires a larger company to compete. Anti-competitive behavior is when you get customers by means other than building a product they want more.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
- adolph 3y agoDid the DOJ provide evidence that Google paid Microsoft to make Bing terrible?
- lakomen 3y agoGoogle has turned evil and there's not much more to say than break it apart. But don't end at Alphabet, continue with Microsoft and Apple, Meta. All evil players.
- user3939382 3y agoThe result I want is that Chromium becomes an independent foundation with Google having no more than 20% contribution and other major users (Microsoft, Opera, Brave, etc) making up the rest.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y agoInteresting that Google has no data on the number of users who switch. Meanwhile it argues "competition is just a click away."
- iamacyborg 3y agoI’m currently reading Michael Lewis’ New New Thing and it’s interesting contrasting this reporting with the reporting in the book of the US vs Microsoft case. An excerpt of which can be read here https://slate.com/news-and-politics/1998/10/the-microsoft-trial-25.html https://slate.com/news-and-politics/1998/10/the-microsoft-tr...
- ceva 3y agogood job US, imagine google moving its whole business to another country :)
- exodust 3y agoI want to see Google slapped for being naughty, but this case is weak. Defaults are defaults. What matters to users is choice. The choice is there to use a different search engine. Google widgets can be removed from phones. Much worse is when Big Tech removes choice. Recent example: Microsoft mandating their Authenticator App as MFA, removing other options like SMS. If my workplace doesn't pay for my phone, and I don't want to install Microsoft crap on my phone, I'm in a bizarre predicament where I could be locked out of work because I refuse to install Microsoft apps on my personal device. This is wrong, much worse than "Google paid someone to be the default".
- colmvp 3y agoI disagree. Browsers like Chrome and Firefox have the ability to install different engines, yet I'd be shocked if Google wasn't at least 90% of the current default search engine on both browers. Most users might be technical enough to change their default, but unless Bing/DDG/et al are demonstrably better in their results, users won't switch.
- sylware 3y agoyep, bad defaults are really hard to get rid off once people are used to them. One of the worst: default mass pre-installation on PC of windows.
- haizhung 3y agoFor anyone interested in a day-to-day briefing on the trial, I can recommend www.bigtechontrial.com.
- willywanker 3y agoWould help a lot if they stopped obsessing over the search engine and focused more on their browser engine and HTML standards as good as monopoly, while pointing out that Firefox exists as controlled opposition, given Mozilla is massively dependent on Google search engine revenue for their finances.