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Comment by eloff | Hacker News Reader

Monopolies are not illegal. Abusing a monopoly position to unfairly crush the competition is. I don't see Google doing that.

The market is open to competition, and Google is very disruptable, if somehow you think you can do a better job than they do. If another Larry and Sergey came along with a search engine that was significantly better, they'd disrupt Google just as easily as the original Larry and Sergey did to whatever was popular before them (I don't even remember.) Do they have the vast majority of the market share? Yes. But they also have plenty of competitors and there's no lock in for people searching, nor a high pain threshold for people to switch search engines. The reason Google holds such a dominant position is simply that their search results are best. If that weren't the case, I'd switch today, and so would you.

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The issue is that what was before them didn't depend on training ML algorithms against ridiculous amounts of current and historic data, including per-user data which is not accessible to anyone except Google.

Google's search engine at this point is nearly impossible to beat. The only way to outcompete it would be to come up with a better system for finding information than full-text search.

"Because having a dominant position in this market makes the monopoly too good to compete with, no one should be allowed to succeed in this market" seems like a stupid rule.

How about rewording that to "markets in which there are only 1-2 possible good providers are not, in fact markets at all", and try to figure out what you do with things that are not markets?

> markets in which there are only 1-2 possible good providers are not, in fact markets at all

First, it's completely false that there are only 1-2 possible good search providers, given that there are already several good search providers that exist today.

You may think Google is better than Bing or DuckDuckGo[0] or Baidu, but there's no arguing that they aren't good.

And the barriers to entry for search are about as low as possible. Google can't stop you from writing your own web crawler, and there's no law preventing you from indexing pages yourself. Yes, that requires time and money, but so does every large market opportunity.

[0] No, this is not redundant, because DuckDuckGo does use its own crawlers in addition to the search results it gets from Bing.

> You may think Google is better than Bing or DuckDuckGo[0] or Baidu, but there's no arguing that they aren't good.

That's not the point. As long as it's nearly impossible for another company to become market leader, there isn't competition there in any meaningful sense. Competition would mean that Bing or DuckDuckGo or Baidu could reasonably overtake Google. One of the only reasons Bing has any market share at all is that their search engine comes on IE by default, and Baidu is primarily used in China because China is protectionist. DuckDuckGo is tiny in comparison.

EDIT: The issue here is that offloading costs to someone other than the consumer - in this case, advertisers - distorts the market so that there's little/no reason to use the second-best search engine. If people had to pay what their searches cost them, some people might realise they could save money by not going for the top option, and we'd have reasonable competition with people choosing between alternatives on multiple axes. This is what keeps, for example, the zipper market functioning.

> As long as it's nearly impossible for another company to become market leader, there isn't competition there in any meaningful sense. Competition would mean that Bing or DuckDuckGo or Baidu could reasonably overtake Google.

That's taking things a bit too far. I'm not aware of any widespread legal or economic definition of "competition" that requires a reasonable chance for multiple firms to become the market leaders. I think that a market can be healthy and competitive even if there is one firm with a solid, say, 75% of the market and no imminent threat to its position as market leader.

I don't disagree, but it doesn't seem to follow from "the search engine business isn't fair" to "okay, then nobody can operate a search engine" or even worse "you can have a search engine, but if you make it too good, we'll shut you down."

Sure. Under current law, it's not illegal, and there's nothing any Government can do about it.

In an ideal world, though, what do we do with things that are not markets? In lots of cases, we artificially create a market by opening up some of the lower-level infrastructure. In the case of ISPs in the UK, we forced BT to split off the part of their business that owns and sells access to much of their physical infrastructure, allowing anyone to run an ISP.

In Google's case, it might be worth forcing them to open some of the data they have to competitors. Of course, given that Google isn't actually tied to any specific country, that's impossible in practice. But what else is reasonable to do with businesses that exist in markets so distorted that they no longer function as markets?

Actually, the test for market power is pricing power. Which Google, I would argue, doesn't have with search: they charge $0 for it, and would drastically lose volume if they increased the price.

They may have pricing power.for search advertising, though.

The barriers to entry depend on a vibrant network of content providers.

Google can't stop you from crawling the web, but Facebook would love to.

Kinda irrelevant to your point, but I heard that Baidu is really quite bad at search.

It sounds like an informal description of the idea of government regulation of natural monopolies. Such regulation is very popular for things like municipal water and electricity infrastructure, but I haven't seen a good argument for why the Internet search engine market would be a natural monopoly.

I still have electrical service. Regulating an industry is different from preventing anyone from operating (effectively) in it - that's just the pathological failure case of poorly thought out regulation, not generally the goal.

Several hundred years ago the same could be said for political power, and now most societies try to limit its concentration as well.

But it doesn't mean nobody goes into politics.

Maybe, maybe not. I'm sure nobody saw Larry and Sergey coming either. Just because you don't see how it can be done, doesn't mean it can't be.

But either way, that's not causing Google to break any anti-trust laws. They don't have to make it easy for competitors, just not unfairly use their power to stomp on them.

One could even make the argument that the reason Google has done such a good job at search over the years is because Larry and Sergey are very afraid of being disrupted by another Larry and Sergey. They have to stay on their toes and they know it.

> But either way, that's not causing Google to break any anti-trust laws.

Sure, I'll agree that they're not breaking any laws.

I worked in search in late 98. When our team saw the first google search page results we talked for an hour and we all agreed that our company should purchase them for $10 million. We talked some more and decided $100 million would still be cheap and would absolutely seal the deal (who knows?). But not invented here prevailed of course. It's better it went the way it did.

If you consider that the product is not search, but rather eyeballs for advertisers (for which they give away the search for free), Facebook has already disrupted the heck out of them.

From a consumer perspective, the product is search. If tomorrow, Safeway stopped charging money for groceries and instead had extremely intrusive ads all throughout its stores, their product would still be groceries.

> If tomorrow, Safeway stopped charging money for groceries and instead had extremely intrusive ads all throughout its stores, their product would still be groceries.

From an accounting perspective, their products would be ads. The groceries would be a cost of good to sell their actual product, ads. This is how 99% of the business world works.

> From a consumer perspective, the product is search.

I'm sure cows think the product is grass/hay/corn from a "consumer perspective", but cows are beautiful dumb inventory with kind eyes.

>The only way to outcompete it would be to come up with a better system for finding information than full-text search.

I think you're spot on. What features could a better system have? One limitation of Google is that you can't group search results...perhaps a better system would cluster results by topic or demographic that views the content, so that you can focus on different perspectives on a search result.

My politics lead me down the path of thinking about how one's social graph could help them find things, either in an automated fashion, an explicit "hey, help me figure this thing out" fashion, or something inbetween.

Yippy.com (formerly clusty.com) is based on that.

I think it's important to take a longer term look. Google has been a real force to be reckoned with, for what, >15 years?

All the sweeter it'll be for someone to come along and stomp them. Considering how high the bar is, there's all the incentive in the world to try and be Google better than Google, at least the way I look at things.

I mean, the company that comes along and figures out how to do search better than Google is going to take practically the entire internet by storm. Maybe some sort of computational knowledge, data-driven AI will find its way into being, or something.

I'm quite excited about it though. I don't think it's impossible at all. I don't think Google really can be split apart either, since Alphabet sort of already did that. Google isn't forcing anybody out of business, and by their own methodology, that would be counterproductive. I mean, putting optic lines down only forces Comcast and the like to step their game up a bit, they are more than welcome to continue doing business, and customers are more than welcome to tell Google to fuck off if they'd prefer their competitors.

There are currently other search engines that still exist, like YaCy and DuckDuckGo, ixquick, and others. They wouldn't be around if they didn't think that there's something they can do better than Google.

> Considering how high the bar is, there's all the incentive in the world to try and be Google better than Google, at least the way I look at things.

Goog has ~20 years of patents behind them, and anyone coming up now will have to figure out a way of being 'better' while not infringing on any patent. And/or, they'll need to have enough deep pockets behind them to weather patent infringement suits.

Patents have a shorter shelf-life than Google. I think eventually we'll come to the conclusion that software and hardware patents are counter-productive and abolish them.

Google took over because PageRank was a revolutionary change over the evolutionary changes that came before (think Lycos -> Altavista). All anyone needs to do is to come up with the next revolutionary thing. Just do that, and you will overturn Google and take over the world.

Keep in mind that Google hasn't been a superpower for very long. All of this 'no one can ever disrupt Google' talk is nonsense.

I know all the history books say it was PageRank, but that wasn't the only reason. As I remember things, Google gained adopters as much from its interface being super fast, dead simple, and easily shareable.

I have to agree.. I remember the first time I saw google search... I was still using yahoo as it was my home page at the time. I found the yahoo version much more useful, that it outweighed google's better results.

Over the course of that year, I saw things get so bad with Y!, that you could sign up for a new email address, and before you could change your opt-out settings, it was too late, the address was sold, and you already had spam in your inbox. That's when Yahoo lost me as a user...

To this day, I have seen decisions of Google that I may not agree with... and others that make me leery in terms of depending on their products/applications. But nothing so sleazy that they've lost me as a user/customer. I know what their business model is... but afaik, they aren't directly selling my information to third parties. This is a pretty big deal.

You remember your searches on Altavista, Yahoo, or Hotbot having the same quality as Google???

The impression people have of Google's search engine is impossible to beat, similar to the impression people have of the usability and stability of Apple's products. Google search is no better than its only competitor, and in ways (especially the image search) it's regressing. A web grep would be 10x as useful as the modern google search for me.

At this point, Google is not the leading search engine due to its quality, any more than the reason Facebook is the leading social network is because someone couldn't build one just as good in a month. Google is the leading search engine because it used to be the leading search engine, and because your phone defaults to it, and because that's what you remember.

If Myspace had put a minimal amount of resources into the coding of its platform instead of pocketing the maximal amount of cash, Facebook wouldn't exist. If Altavista had kept a clean page, and maybe showed a bit more personality and interest in algorithms, Google wouldn't exist.

> Abusing a monopoly position to unfairly crush the competition is. I don't see Google doing that.

Really?! I see a ton of places where Google is leveraging their dominant position in search (which I agree they won because they are the best) into other areas. Remember when Google marketed Google Plus right on the search homepage? Android (at least the vast majority of Android versions that users use) is tightly interwoven with Google services.

In fact, I see a ton of parallels between Microsoft in the late 90s (where they leveraged their dominant OS position into lots of other areas) and Google of today.

MS took a paid for product in the market and used Windows to drive it's price to $0, basically killing Netscape. This was a position where they used their monopoly on the desktop to beat a competitive product that was, at the time, purchased at a store in a box.

For Google, while it does use its position to promote its stuff, it's also the kind of thing where you can avoid it by typing in duckduckgo.com or Yahoo.com. It's not a huge barrier to avoid Google. It's not as if Google has built the only train tracks west of the Mississippi, and is not allowing anyone else to use them. Rather, it's more like they built a balloon you sorta grab outa the air for free as you need it, with the ability to quickly try another balloon from a different manufacturer just by grabbing at the string next to it.

If Google was restricting Web Searches of paid-for items to only its stores, or making it so you could only read the NYT by paying Google to access that site's news, or some other thing where they were gatekeeping with a toll, they'd be acting as a monopolistic corp. But since you can always just type in another URL within a few seconds and be at another search engine, I see it as a fairly cut and dried sign that competition exists and is accessible, it's just shittier than Google.

Antitrust questions become much more stringent than people might realise.

Even if you are 100% "fair game", if you happen to be in a dominant position then you have a responsibility to not use your huge clout to win in other markets. Even advertising Chrome on the Google homepage is a very tricky legal question (and the wording on the page!)

The MS case is interesting too. Even after basically all browsers became "free", MS is still obligated to offer a browser choice screen in European Windows. Despite basically no barriers to entry, the fact that IE is packaged in by default is still too much for some regulators.

It's as if Google has built the only train tracks west of the Mississippi, and nobody else has bothered to build them. Sure, you can get to the bus stop still (or whatever), but the fact is Google is dominant in web access, and must give competitors a fighting chance. Even if it means hobbling their own efforts.

> Monopolies are not illegal. Abusing a monopoly position to unfairly crush the competition is.

That sounds nice and fairly reasonable. Unfortunately it's not necessarily true. In U.S. v. Alcoa [0], the Supreme Court [1] held that Alcoa's dominance in the aluminum market was illegal, despite the fact that their dominance was attained simply by regularly adding new industrial capacity and executing their business efficiently.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Alcoa

[1] actually the Second Circuit ruled on the Supreme Court's behalf; an interesting story for another day.

The monopoly isn't search, its advertising, which is evolving into a Google/Facebook split.

If someone came up with a better search engine, Google would just buy it or hire the principals before they did.

> If someone came up with a better search engine, Google would just buy it or hire the principals before they did.

Not really. The people with the better search engine might prefer to be 'the next Google' instead, and if they're not public yet its easy to not be bought. Just say no (even the VC's might prefer this as it could be a bigger later payout). If it was that easy to just buy anyone you wanted, Google would've owned Facebook quite awhile ago.

True.

Microsoft would not beat IBM for being 'the next IBM'

Tesla would not beat Major car industries for being 'the next-gen Toyota way'

and, Google, probably will be replaced by someone in a complete industry. My guess that might be something that comes from VR.

I think it's entirely possible for a new advertising company to take hold... Google and Facebook haven't done the greatest job here, and are simply the largest because of their vertical market.. that doesn't mean there isn't room for competition and sites that are better than the linkbait sites currently used.

Are there any companies that are still innovating in search? Google is so broken, it's almost worthless for at least half of my searches. At least, I have to modify my search terms at least 10 times before I can narrow the search results down to what I'm looking for. Advanced search operators used to be sufficient for a lot of deep searches, but I'm not sure which search engine still support them.

They're already getting in trouble in Europe over Android anti-trust.

> they'd disrupt Google just as easily as the original Larry and Sergey did to whatever was popular before them (I don't even remember.)

Webrings and word-of-mouth? Google didn't dethrone any particular search provider.

Altavista.

Altavista was terrible, and definitely not a 'go to' for search. Yes, it was a search engine, but it wasn't exactly sitting on a throne.

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