I don't really see how this is any different to a supermarket giving better visibility to their own brand generics over branded products. There should be no onus on Google to display anything other than what they want to display on their site.
So the alternatives are that it's an awareness problem, or (if it's not, as you're asserting) that people know and don't care, in which case forcing Google to change policy seems like it wouldn't actually be a move benefiting the people. Why restrict a business practice that most people don't actually think is bad?
(So I think lack of awareness is more likely, personally).
Disclaimer: could be very personal ; Google tracks what i'm interested in AND my queries are tailored to Google I guess.
Someone would need to pay for it and its likely part of what they want money from Google for.
Google isn't IE in 2000, it's Kleenex or Jello-o.
Only in the US. It's Google in most of the world.
How exactly does Google possess or control the supply of searches? You are always free to use any of several other search engines: Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Baidu, and quite a few others. Facebook and Apple are getting into the game as well.
There is this thing called a "dominant position". There are formulas which are used to calculate if a company has a dominant position. If they do have, it is up to the court to decide whether they are abusing their dominant position.
https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
It's not at all clear that anything Google does prevents competition. Indeed, if you google "search engines", Google itself doesn't even appear on the first page. I get DogPile, DuckDuckGo, Bing, and Wikipedia as my top four hits. Then there's something about "say goodbye to Google: 14 alternatives". If I search for "webmail", gmail is the eighth hit. Based on my 16-odd years of daily use of Google, it hardly seems as though Google is trying to limit or downplay the competition.
The EU complaint appears to be that Google displays a pattern of promoting its own products in searches. I doubt they can prove that; it's likely that different results are promoted based on algorithms that target user preferences and history, not an evil plan to make the world buy Google services. Why would Google do that? It's a stupid thing to do and they already have a dominant position as you say, so they don't need to. No one says "let me bing that for you". No one says "just look it up on yahoo". Google has the dominant mindshare and they simply can sit back and enjoy being the success that they are.
That's the common-language definition, but that's somewhat tangential in discussing legal action. The legal criteria in US antitrust jurisprudence is actually pricing power, I think the same is true in the EU (both US and EU antitrust regulations do, though to a lesser extent than monopolies with pricing power, regulate some anticompetitive actions of non-monopolies as well -- the EU, as I understand, goes further than the US in this area.)
Even if it were not, finding the alternative supermarket is doing exactly the same thing, but not quite as well, may be disappointing?
And last time I checked nearly everyone was like "oh, that's their system, they can do whatever they want with it". Why would it be any different for a weaker case like this?
Personally I don't think the antitrust will stick. It is incredibly easy to change your search engine. They may be required to select a default engine on install of chrome. I switched to duckduckgo.com about a year ago. With duckduckgo, your results aren't as ad laden, they don't track you, they don't randomly insist you turn on intrusive tracking to provide services. I would much rather take an extra step for the 1/100 searches ddg doesn't cut it than see ads above the scroll. Setting a blue/green color scheme in the upper right corner, instead of the default monochrome makes a big difference.
tl;dr: there are options.
For example, sometimes I want to revisit a HN article I read days or hour ago, and often it's just faster to type it into Google than it is to search from the history. Typing in "hn google skews" into (incognito mode) Google brings up this thread and the actual news post as the first two, while DDG just brings up pages and pages of irrelevant stuff.
Edit: I did the same search and for the default results Google showed the news (not hackernews specifically) and ddg didn't. But under the news tab in ddg you get similar results.
We had search engines with magic symbols prior to Google. People don't like learning magic search language; finding the right shibboleth of qualifiers, excluders, and "near-word" matches feels a lot like doing the search engine's job for it. Most people seem to prefer Google's approach of making a guess at what you want based on past search history.
This doesn't mean DDG can't succeed. But in addition to their selling point of not remembering your search history and having a mechanically-tunable query, they may want to consider offering a search-history "smart" search at some point in the future.
!hn google skews results
On google you'd type this for the same behavior:
site:news.ycombinator.com google skews
Duck duck go could provide the same behavior if they displayed the top search result of "!<first word> search" when I type "<first word> search" if it realizes <first word> is one of these popular keywords or a synonym
The same search on the same site returns different results as soon as I run my traffic through a US network.
Do they have pricing power in search? If not, what difference does it make that they have 70% of search volume?
It's also hard to compare Google to a supermarket. Other than towns where Wal-Mart is the only option there's not really a real world comparison to Google. You can say Bing is a real competitor to Google but we all know it barely makes a dent.
The other issue at hand here is Google being misleading, because they present that the rankings are objective/fair to both users and the web sites being listed. If they are skewing in favor of their own products, that's clear misrepresentation.
The only exceptions are Aldi, Trader Joe's and Costco. The first two mostly only sell private label products and the last will often only have one offering of a given type of product (which may be a brand or may be private label.)
But most supermarkets in the US (the big chains like Wal-Mart, Meijer, Kroger, etc.) will have generics and brand products for everything from cough syrup to bread right next to each other on the shelves. This is a silly argument and I really have no idea why you left the reply you did. Yeah shelves are precious but that has nothing to do with what I said.
EDIT:
Some companies will pay to be on the shelves but these are usually brands that are not established yet. Regardless that really has nothing to do with what I was talking about. I wasn't talking about how products get to the shelves, it was about whether stores put their generic products in favorable positions compared to branded products. And at least in the US generally they don't.
If your point is that store shelves are a bad analogy for Google results, I would agree. I'm not the one who came up with it.
That just covers the basics of placement though. Companies will pay to have their products placed at the beginning of aisles, in "special offer" areas, etc etc. There's a whole "science" of supermarket layout.
Fairness is not the reason store-brand and generic products are near each other on the shelves. It's because you get more sales if you organise a store so it's easy for customers to find stuff.
"Yeah shelves are precious but that has nothing to do with what I said."
It does. You proposed one explanation why generic and branded products are next to each other (fairness). I proposed an alternative explanation (maximising the returns from limited shelf space).