11 ms·

European parliament may propose search services split in threat to Google

51 points by maverick2 12y ago

maverick2 12y ago
Scale has its advantage, products like Google Now or a Home Robot/Assistant is not possible unless there are a ton of data points available to be processed. I thinking breaking up is not a solution, but rather content(headlines included) and data about customer should be traded between companies using APIs. Like a data exchange, just like exchanges for electricity and other utilities. Imagine a time in future when you want a fancy Apple robot, but that robot is dumb unless it has access to all of your current and past data.
- Someone 12y ago
  I think you are making two opposite statements: "should be traded between companies using APIs" gives me he impression you want to give the companies control over your^W their data. At the moment there are laws prohibiting the former, IMO rightfully so. "when you want a fancy Apple robot, but that robot is dumb unless it has access to all of your current and past data." makes it look as if you want humans to have control over who has access to their data. I think that should be the norm, and if laws are retired to get there, I think we should get them.
  - maverick2 12y ago
    ok, yep let me clear that. What I mean is -Companies should be able to own and trade their users data with other companies. This should be like a stock or ad exchange. More pull requests for certain data, higher the data connection price. -Also blogs should be able to charge $0 or some amount for search bots to crawl them. Its demand and supply if. NYT might be able to ask for some price while Buzzfeed can say .. eh we'll set that to free. -Now for user, Example If I pay $200 for a robot - The company can say, hey it is $10 to use it monthly(because the robot company figures that is avg cost to fetch data, lets say from Goog FB AMZN etc). But some companies can say, the data of their users is owned by them and their user so if the user want to use his/her data then its free. But if the company wants to use to for some other means without user consent then its up for sale. Its kind of like twitter's firehose, just more universal. Will encourage companies to develop APIs since now they can charge its use. I'd love a google now/robot to suggest me what netflix flick I should see based on my Bing search history.
pasta_2 12y ago
Before people start suggesting this is some anti-American agenda from the EU, keep in mind there are many American companies that have been complaining to the EU such as Yelp and Expedia. They want to stop Google's tying practices such as using their monopoly in search (another thing to keep in mind is that their market share in the EU is something absurd like over 90%) to benefit other products and services. It's not really calling for breaking up the company. Also this is specifically about raising the temperature on the European Commission. Parliament itself doesn't do this. This is a signal from politicians to the European Commission that they can go hard.
- msabalau 12y ago
  Thanks for reminding me to avoid ever using Yelp and Expedia, to object their taking advantage of Europe's anti-American industrial policy instincts.
- AJ007 12y ago
  Ben Edelman, somewhat notorious for being paid by Microsoft, has done a really good excellent job at documenting problems with Google for many years. Irregardless of who paid for the time invested, these problems have been well researched and aren't simply American companies playing cry baby. I'm not a regulator, and am not suggesting a regulatory answer, but I think Peter Thiel has given a fairly honest explanation that Google's rationalizations are largely PR-fud. There are very profound and far reaching issues here. Imagine if instead of Wikipedia we had some encyclopedia where half of page 1 was sponsored editorial and the rest of what made it on page 1 was done in a totally opaque environment by a company who had commercial interests on what was showing up. If your company operates in a fairly narrow market, has limited retention, and needs to use search traffic vs demographic traffic to build your audience, you are effectively operating day to day with a giant guillotine over your neck. (Very happy to see DuckDuckGo get some meaningful traction, and for Google's sake with the regulators the better DuckDuckGo does the more room there is to let off some pressure.)
gress 12y ago
Search is a public utility, just like the Internet itself.
- mbreese 12y ago
  How could search be considered a public utility? You can use any search engine you'd like. If you don't like Google, switch to Bing or something else. That's not the case with things like water or electricity (usually). Internet service as a utility? Maybe (in the US at least with limited options). But search? Don't blame Google because they are really good at what they do. They aren't stopping you from using another service, nor are they stopping others from creating their own search engine.
  - baq 12y ago
    for vast majority of people, what's the difference between 'the internet' and 'google homepage'? you can theoretically use something else than google, true, but if you bundle all search engines together and disable every single one of them, the internet for a great majority of the population that has access to it becomes completely useless.
    - mbreese 12y ago
      For the vast majority of people Goolge doesn't control their web browser. For some, yes, but it's only a default for Android or Chromebooks. Browsers can and do change their defaults whenever they'd like: see Firefox this past week. That's an issue for the browsers, not the search engine. I'm not aware of any browser (sans Chrome) where the default homepage is Google.com.
- duaneb 12y ago
  That's nonsense. There's not even a consensus on how to search, let alone enough to define a public service based around it. You can bet a government run search service would be absolutely terrible at this point in time.
  - 12y ago
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
biomimic 12y ago
Google != AT&T
wfjackson 12y ago
Perhaps they should be forced to release keywords versus clicked links data to other companies like Duck Duck Go, just like Microsoft was forced to document things like SMB for Samba and the various Office formats.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
dkei 12y ago
This is political posturing and grandstanding on steroids, whoever bought the EU parliament (evidently Germany publishers) did a good job. They can’t “break up” Google, it’s an American company! it’s not based there. Also the previous competition chief ridiculed such notions when he was recently asked about it by Parliament citing the utility companies (German ones) that would be first in line for a breakup debate if that was a tool they wanted to use: The decision to reopen settlement talks followed vigorous criticism from a widening range of politicians, including the economy ministers of France and Germany. The latter, Sigmar Gabriel, argued in May that a forced breakup of Google should be seriously considered because of its vast market power. Werner Langen, a European lawmaker representing German Chancellor Angela Merkel's CDU party, echoed that suggestion, drawing parallels with U.S. efforts to break up monopolies in oil and other industries. "If we don't give them a bash we're not going to solve the problem," he said. Mr. Almunia showed little sympathy for such demands. "I would tell you one thing, as a German friend," he said. "The day I [hear] that the railways will accept unbundling, electricity companies will accept unbundling, and we will discuss [unbundling] with telecom operators and others…let's discuss unbundling Google, but not before. via http://online.wsj.com/articles/google-must-improve-search-settlement-or-face-charges-eus-almunia-says-1411462097 http://online.wsj.com/articles/google-must-improve-search-se... The fact that they are drafting a motion targeting one company is so shamelessly political it’s almost a public display of corruption. Not to mention that the ludicrous levels of attention and weigh this issue is getting in the EU is unheard of and unwarranted: One technology industry source with knowledge of the motion also called it a "politically-motivated campaign to do something that is a regulatory matter". He added: "These guys are calling for the break-up of Google. That is not in proportion to the degree of concern articulated by the commission during its investigation.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
    - deleted 12y ago
mschuster91 12y ago
Rivals should maybe ask themselves why Google has such an enormous market share in search. Maybe a 90% market share originates simply from better quality?
- lucb1e 12y ago
  Looking in access logs, I hardly get any visits from Bing or Yandex or Baidu but Google is there all the time over IPv4 and IPv6. It's not like Bing doesn't have the resources to index websites more often.
  - Someone1234 12y ago
    As someone who has legitimately tried to use Bing let me just say, Bing's issue isn't its lack of indexing. Every time you search on Google you're "teaching" Google's system what results you'll most likely want. So for example if I search for "that movie with dinosaurs" on Bing and Google, Bing's no.1 result is an IMDB link to a movie called "Dinosaur (2000)." That's not a "stupid" suggestion, but it is still not how people use search engines. Google shows me "jurassic park" and "the land before time" neither of which contain the word "dinosaur" in the title. That's because millions of people have likely searched "that movie with a dinosaur" and clicked on the "Jurassic Park"/"Land Before Time" links. This information cannot be gained by simply just indexing no matter how amazing your indexer is. So let's say, theoretically, that someone stole Google's code. They then reproduced Google's infrastructure, search algorithms, and so on but WITHOUT Google's massive database of historic queries. I legitimately do not think that this company, even with all of Google's stuff could catch up with Google, because 1. Those historic queries now ARE the core of Google's results, and 2. Google will always out-pace the competition in generating new intelligent results (due to more usage). It is a circular problem. Bing could be twice as good as Google under the covers, but it will never catch up for the reasons I said above... Ditto with DDG or anyone else. PS - As an aside, Google's search query parsing is significantly better than Bing's when it comes to programming/technical queries. Every time a quote appears in a bing query it treats it as a literal query string, Google seems to understand the context of the double quote (i.e. that it was from the source material) and give you non-literal query string results.
yuhong 12y ago
I am thinking of a tutorial on search result pages as a settlement.
adventured 12y ago
Following this premise, I guess it's time to assess massive trade tariffs on all vehicles manufactured by German companies, either domestically, or imported. Their dominance in the luxury category is really just too much, it needs to be significantly regulated or reduced. For Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Porsche the US is their largest market. Between 20% and 25% of all sales typically come from the US for those automakers. Jobs will be lost? Nah, auto supply will shift to domestics and or Asian manufacturers. The Germans will simply lose a big fat market, and it's unlikely all of Europe will agree to strike back against US automakers. Economic war is the only thing that is likely to come out of the EU trying to split Google.
ricardonunez 12y ago
Google search competitors are not even close with the quality of Google search results. This year I started trying Bing, Yahoo and right now DuckDuckGo as an experiment and none of them has the same quality. Bing is the only one that came closer. That's why Google owns search. They may be using shady tactics, but the competitors still need to get better.
- AJ007 12y ago
  The last time someone told me this, I asked them when the last time they ran with adblocking was -- answer, years.
  - ricardonunez 12y ago
    I do. I also use privacy badger and private/incognito browsing. Interpreting keywords is way ahead of the rest. One thing that's getting worst is geo targeting though. They are trying way to hard to show you local results for everything you search.
- mc32 12y ago
  Not only that but "the resolution calls on the European Commission “to consider proposals with the aim of unbundling search engines from other commercial services” to introduce more competition into online search in Europe." How would unbundling 'other commercial services' make other search options any better? I imagine with Google only focusing on search they'd get closer to 100% in the EU rather than causing more competition. Something's off in their reasoning.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

51 points by maverick2 12y ago

Scale has its advantage, products like Google Now or a Home Robot/Assistant is not possible unless there are a ton of data points available to be processed. I thinking breaking up is not a solution, but rather content(headlines included) and data about customer should be traded between companies using APIs. Like a data exchange, just like exchanges for electricity and other utilities. Imagine a time in future when you want a fancy Apple robot, but that robot is dumb unless it has access to all of your current and past data.

Someone 12y ago
I think you are making two opposite statements: "should be traded between companies using APIs" gives me he impression you want to give the companies control over your^W their data. At the moment there are laws prohibiting the former, IMO rightfully so. "when you want a fancy Apple robot, but that robot is dumb unless it has access to all of your current and past data." makes it look as if you want humans to have control over who has access to their data. I think that should be the norm, and if laws are retired to get there, I think we should get them.
- maverick2 12y ago
  ok, yep let me clear that. What I mean is -Companies should be able to own and trade their users data with other companies. This should be like a stock or ad exchange. More pull requests for certain data, higher the data connection price. -Also blogs should be able to charge $0 or some amount for search bots to crawl them. Its demand and supply if. NYT might be able to ask for some price while Buzzfeed can say .. eh we'll set that to free. -Now for user, Example If I pay $200 for a robot - The company can say, hey it is $10 to use it monthly(because the robot company figures that is avg cost to fetch data, lets say from Goog FB AMZN etc). But some companies can say, the data of their users is owned by them and their user so if the user want to use his/her data then its free. But if the company wants to use to for some other means without user consent then its up for sale. Its kind of like twitter's firehose, just more universal. Will encourage companies to develop APIs since now they can charge its use. I'd love a google now/robot to suggest me what netflix flick I should see based on my Bing search history.

pasta_2 12y ago

Before people start suggesting this is some anti-American agenda from the EU, keep in mind there are many American companies that have been complaining to the EU such as Yelp and Expedia. They want to stop Google's tying practices such as using their monopoly in search (another thing to keep in mind is that their market share in the EU is something absurd like over 90%) to benefit other products and services. It's not really calling for breaking up the company. Also this is specifically about raising the temperature on the European Commission. Parliament itself doesn't do this. This is a signal from politicians to the European Commission that they can go hard.

msabalau 12y ago
Thanks for reminding me to avoid ever using Yelp and Expedia, to object their taking advantage of Europe's anti-American industrial policy instincts.
AJ007 12y ago
Ben Edelman, somewhat notorious for being paid by Microsoft, has done a really good excellent job at documenting problems with Google for many years. Irregardless of who paid for the time invested, these problems have been well researched and aren't simply American companies playing cry baby. I'm not a regulator, and am not suggesting a regulatory answer, but I think Peter Thiel has given a fairly honest explanation that Google's rationalizations are largely PR-fud. There are very profound and far reaching issues here. Imagine if instead of Wikipedia we had some encyclopedia where half of page 1 was sponsored editorial and the rest of what made it on page 1 was done in a totally opaque environment by a company who had commercial interests on what was showing up. If your company operates in a fairly narrow market, has limited retention, and needs to use search traffic vs demographic traffic to build your audience, you are effectively operating day to day with a giant guillotine over your neck. (Very happy to see DuckDuckGo get some meaningful traction, and for Google's sake with the regulators the better DuckDuckGo does the more room there is to let off some pressure.)

gress 12y ago

Search is a public utility, just like the Internet itself.

mbreese 12y ago
How could search be considered a public utility? You can use any search engine you'd like. If you don't like Google, switch to Bing or something else. That's not the case with things like water or electricity (usually). Internet service as a utility? Maybe (in the US at least with limited options). But search? Don't blame Google because they are really good at what they do. They aren't stopping you from using another service, nor are they stopping others from creating their own search engine.
- baq 12y ago
  for vast majority of people, what's the difference between 'the internet' and 'google homepage'? you can theoretically use something else than google, true, but if you bundle all search engines together and disable every single one of them, the internet for a great majority of the population that has access to it becomes completely useless.
  - mbreese 12y ago
    For the vast majority of people Goolge doesn't control their web browser. For some, yes, but it's only a default for Android or Chromebooks. Browsers can and do change their defaults whenever they'd like: see Firefox this past week. That's an issue for the browsers, not the search engine. I'm not aware of any browser (sans Chrome) where the default homepage is Google.com.
duaneb 12y ago
That's nonsense. There's not even a consensus on how to search, let alone enough to define a public service based around it. You can bet a government run search service would be absolutely terrible at this point in time.
- 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

biomimic 12y ago

Google != AT&T

wfjackson 12y ago

Perhaps they should be forced to release keywords versus clicked links data to other companies like Duck Duck Go, just like Microsoft was forced to document things like SMB for Samba and the various Office formats.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

dkei 12y ago

This is political posturing and grandstanding on steroids, whoever bought the EU parliament (evidently Germany publishers) did a good job. They can’t “break up” Google, it’s an American company! it’s not based there. Also the previous competition chief ridiculed such notions when he was recently asked about it by Parliament citing the utility companies (German ones) that would be first in line for a breakup debate if that was a tool they wanted to use: The decision to reopen settlement talks followed vigorous criticism from a widening range of politicians, including the economy ministers of France and Germany. The latter, Sigmar Gabriel, argued in May that a forced breakup of Google should be seriously considered because of its vast market power. Werner Langen, a European lawmaker representing German Chancellor Angela Merkel's CDU party, echoed that suggestion, drawing parallels with U.S. efforts to break up monopolies in oil and other industries. "If we don't give them a bash we're not going to solve the problem," he said. Mr. Almunia showed little sympathy for such demands. "I would tell you one thing, as a German friend," he said. "The day I [hear] that the railways will accept unbundling, electricity companies will accept unbundling, and we will discuss [unbundling] with telecom operators and others…let's discuss unbundling Google, but not before. via http://online.wsj.com/articles/google-must-improve-search-settlement-or-face-charges-eus-almunia-says-1411462097 http://online.wsj.com/articles/google-must-improve-search-se... The fact that they are drafting a motion targeting one company is so shamelessly political it’s almost a public display of corruption. Not to mention that the ludicrous levels of attention and weigh this issue is getting in the EU is unheard of and unwarranted: One technology industry source with knowledge of the motion also called it a "politically-motivated campaign to do something that is a regulatory matter". He added: "These guys are calling for the break-up of Google. That is not in proportion to the degree of concern articulated by the commission during its investigation.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 12y ago

mschuster91 12y ago

Rivals should maybe ask themselves why Google has such an enormous market share in search. Maybe a 90% market share originates simply from better quality?

lucb1e 12y ago
Looking in access logs, I hardly get any visits from Bing or Yandex or Baidu but Google is there all the time over IPv4 and IPv6. It's not like Bing doesn't have the resources to index websites more often.
- Someone1234 12y ago
  As someone who has legitimately tried to use Bing let me just say, Bing's issue isn't its lack of indexing. Every time you search on Google you're "teaching" Google's system what results you'll most likely want. So for example if I search for "that movie with dinosaurs" on Bing and Google, Bing's no.1 result is an IMDB link to a movie called "Dinosaur (2000)." That's not a "stupid" suggestion, but it is still not how people use search engines. Google shows me "jurassic park" and "the land before time" neither of which contain the word "dinosaur" in the title. That's because millions of people have likely searched "that movie with a dinosaur" and clicked on the "Jurassic Park"/"Land Before Time" links. This information cannot be gained by simply just indexing no matter how amazing your indexer is. So let's say, theoretically, that someone stole Google's code. They then reproduced Google's infrastructure, search algorithms, and so on but WITHOUT Google's massive database of historic queries. I legitimately do not think that this company, even with all of Google's stuff could catch up with Google, because 1. Those historic queries now ARE the core of Google's results, and 2. Google will always out-pace the competition in generating new intelligent results (due to more usage). It is a circular problem. Bing could be twice as good as Google under the covers, but it will never catch up for the reasons I said above... Ditto with DDG or anyone else. PS - As an aside, Google's search query parsing is significantly better than Bing's when it comes to programming/technical queries. Every time a quote appears in a bing query it treats it as a literal query string, Google seems to understand the context of the double quote (i.e. that it was from the source material) and give you non-literal query string results.

yuhong 12y ago

I am thinking of a tutorial on search result pages as a settlement.

adventured 12y ago

Following this premise, I guess it's time to assess massive trade tariffs on all vehicles manufactured by German companies, either domestically, or imported. Their dominance in the luxury category is really just too much, it needs to be significantly regulated or reduced. For Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Porsche the US is their largest market. Between 20% and 25% of all sales typically come from the US for those automakers. Jobs will be lost? Nah, auto supply will shift to domestics and or Asian manufacturers. The Germans will simply lose a big fat market, and it's unlikely all of Europe will agree to strike back against US automakers. Economic war is the only thing that is likely to come out of the EU trying to split Google.

ricardonunez 12y ago

Google search competitors are not even close with the quality of Google search results. This year I started trying Bing, Yahoo and right now DuckDuckGo as an experiment and none of them has the same quality. Bing is the only one that came closer. That's why Google owns search. They may be using shady tactics, but the competitors still need to get better.

AJ007 12y ago
The last time someone told me this, I asked them when the last time they ran with adblocking was -- answer, years.
- ricardonunez 12y ago
  I do. I also use privacy badger and private/incognito browsing. Interpreting keywords is way ahead of the rest. One thing that's getting worst is geo targeting though. They are trying way to hard to show you local results for everything you search.
mc32 12y ago
Not only that but "the resolution calls on the European Commission “to consider proposals with the aim of unbundling search engines from other commercial services” to introduce more competition into online search in Europe." How would unbundling 'other commercial services' make other search options any better? I imagine with Google only focusing on search they'd get closer to 100% in the EU rather than causing more competition. Something's off in their reasoning.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]