Google is Crushing the Internet | Hacker News Reader

Google is Crushing the Internet

theweek.com

I don't have a strong opinion about whether or not google should be regulated or not. However, this guy doesn't seem appreciate the scale of the difficulties that google solved and how much better google was than the competition. They almost single-handedly transformed the internet into a useful tool. Altavista and yahoo were like looking up information in a card catalog in comparison. It wasn't just a first mover advantage. And they followed it up by releasing, an ads platform that made everyone else look like amateur hour, a mail product that was far better than hotmail, a mapping tool much better than MapQuest, and a web browser that was far better than ie or Firefox.

They are in the position they're in because they solved a lot of difficult problems and made it look easy. If we ever get to the point that we need as a society to rein them in, we should do it with a full understanding of what they've accomplished.

It's bizarre to accuse the company that made the internet into what it is today of somehow crushing it.

Basically you're explaining that they earned a monopoly for a reason. That's true. And there are always true advantages to monopoly (standardization, economy of scale, prices stability ...). However monopolies harm the economy and the public good in the long run.

See, that works for any past monopoly:

I don't have a strong opinion about whether or not Microsoft should be regulated or not. [...] It's bizarre to accuse the company that made the PC into what it is today of somehow crushing it.

I don't have a strong opinion about whether or not AT&T should be regulated or not. [...] It's bizarre to accuse the company that made the telephone into what it is today of somehow crushing it.

I don't have a strong opinion about whether or not Standard Oil should be regulated or not. [...] It's bizarre to accuse the company that made the oil industry into what it is today of somehow crushing it.

It has always been strange for me to understand Google search as a monopoly. First, there are competitors. Second, it's free (yes, I know you pay with data). Third, you can use the internet without using any of Google's services (except adsense, I suppose). How is Google's search a monopoly when it's the user who is deciding they prefer it to Bing or Duck Duck Go or Yahoo? Perhaps my understanding of monopoly is incomplete because this makes no sense to me.

The argument here is not that it is directly bad for consumers but that Google is bad for producers, and that in the long run, consumers will suffer from less quality content.

If I produce content that I want other people to view, I have to cater it to googles requirements or almost nobody sees it. Simply put Google is the biggest driver of traffic and ad dollars.

If you play by (or if you game) Googles rules you can make piles of cash, driven by the traffic they send your way. Then the next day it can dry up with no reason given.

Saying that the user prefers it is a slightly backward way of thinking about it. Does the user prefer it because it is better, or is it because abuse of their monopoly doesn't allow other providers to achieve the same quality of service?

If I produce content that I want other people to view, I have to cater it to googles requirements or almost nobody sees it. Simply put Google is the biggest driver of traffic and ad dollars.

I know of a few bloggers who don't seem to be dependent on Google or Facebook to maintain their business.

1. John Gruber (daringireball.com). He made a name for himself over 15 years and is famous enough to be on the shortlist of people that Apple always reaches out to when they want to do a four or five person press event. He routinely gets VPs from Apple on his podcast.

He sells RSS sponsorships - one at the beginning of the week and one at the end of the week. He also makes money from his podcast.

He did lose half his readership after Google killed off Google Reader, but he said since he never sold his ads based on the number of readers, it hasn't hurt his business too badly.

2. Ben Thompson (stratechery.com). He posts once a week to his blog, became popular and has over 2000 subscribers to his newsletter that he charges $100/a year for. He has one advertiser for his podcast - mailchimp - they sponsored him for an entire year.

3. Marco Arment - first architect of Tumblr, creator of Instapaper, and now Overcast. He is also a decently well known blogger in the Apple ecosystem. He basically created his own podcast app ad sales platform, and has a popular podcast.

4. Horace Deidu. He started out as a blogger/analyst and now he gives speeches and does workshops worldwide.

It's hard getting noticed over the noise, but it can be done. It is possible to create a viable content business without an over reliance on Google.

But it's only that way because each internet user has decided to prefer that search engine.

It's different than, say, Facebook.

The monopoly is also harming google. You already see it creeping in, having there products with most add-revenue being pushed into other sub-projects destroying those projects chances to succeed. Moonshots being canceled, because they could threaten the base-model or connection to another company. Maybe, google should create lots of little sub-companies, pump them full of money from Add- and allow them to buy themselves out - staying in the google-ecosystem, but standing alone. Makes no sense economically, but from the point of what google wanted to be, this is the one true approach.

Well I think in terms of getting users, the only reasonable case for monopoly abuse is the way they promote the chrome web browser, and that's going to be more of an issue when they start selectively blocking ads from competitors while allowing their own ads through.

However, I think there's a much stronger case for the way they abuse publishers and reformat content. I think there is room for legislation there to clarify what it is exactly that search engines are allowed to in terms of spidering content and presenting it to users.

But even so, we should understand how important google is, and try not to kill the golden goose.

Agreed. I can't believe the author thinks google is only marginally better than the others. On several occasions I forced myself to use bing only but almost always found myself running the same searches on google for everything but the simplest queries.

Author has an agenda. He's piggy backing on NYT piece the other day. Timing is interesting with correspondent's dinner fast approaching.

Google produced more relevant results than Altavista. That's about it. They didn't build or save the internet. Without them, search engines would have improved anyway and we'd be just fine. Google was never a charity and we don't have to protect such corporate behemoths from criticism.

Search engines have improved. Bing, DDG, Yahoo are all better than Altavista. But none of them are as good as Google. That being said, no entity is above criticism. The monopoly criticism just doesn't fit though, unless we're redefining what that word means.

Yeah, this guy's history of how Google got to where it was ("it was just luck!") is truly baffling. I find the scope of Google's reach quite frightening, but I'll certainly acknowledge that it's because they so often have the best product. Do you remember when Google Instant came out in 2010? I remember being blown away by how fast it was, to the point of "how do they do that?" awe.

"Yeah, this guy's history of how Google got to where it was ("it was just luck!") is truly baffling."

It sort of was, though, given it started with a good, nearly-irreplaceable algorithm protected by a patent for 20 years. All kinds of people were looking for one. They lucked out. Whereas, I'd buy the hard work argument if they didn't have a patent on it, competition was allowed, and they still became Google of today.

How far would IBM or Microsoft or Apple have gotten without patents?

Pagerank is overrated. It is within a mean field approximation of a simple link count; PR does not improve relevance, it only lets you pick the most popular page from a set of pages that may be more or less relevant. Anchor link text is a far more important contribution to Google's results, but it serves Google well if outsiders get false news about how it works.

IBM and Microsoft got furthest on first mover advantage, shady deals with OEM's plus universities promoting lock-in, and copyright law. Microsoft didn't need patents at all to become a power house far as I can tell. I'm not sure about IBM. Apple succeeded on brand and copyright initially.

So, I doubt they needed patents except to preserve market share later on after they got established. As in, to remove competition like we see with IBM vs Hercules-based company, Microsoft vs Android w/ royalties, and Apple vs Samsung or Mac clones trying to take their products out of stores. Strictly helping them maximize profit and minimize competition in markets they've already taken.

Apple would have gotten just as far, given they've lost most every IP lawsuit they've ever filed. Even their Samsung "win" was reduced so much on appeal it turned into a speeding ticket.

Google got ahead of altavista with better search relevance, but it became a viable business based on AdWords, and to this day this is where it gets a durable advantage. It is hard to make a quantitative case that Google beats Bing today in relevance, but it is an order of magnitude better at competitors at turning clicks into cash.

Yeah...pining for the days of banner ads, IE6, Flash and dog-slow JavaScript seems like a very publisher-centric worldview. If Google feels like an oppressive monopoly, it would be from the publisher side of the equation. I can definitely see how it feels like Google gives publishers the privilege of displaying Google ads rather than treating them as an appreciated part of the business.

I remember when Google was becoming mainstream and having friends with websites ask me how they could show up higher in Google rankings. It was usually included with an endorsement of how much they valued the search results as a user. My response was usually to demonstrate a search for their business by name and show them that their site was the first result. This was predictably followed by the protestation, "yes, but I'm talking about keyword?"

Even now, there's an inability for people to see how Google values the different participants in its ecosystem. They're an advertising network that sells its users to advertisers. And it sells its publishers' content to acquire users. Publishers have always been the lowest rung of the ladder. The disconnect usually comes from the fact that most publishers also use Google as users and want the same satisfaction from the publisher experience that they get from the user experience.

It may be that having experience with Lexis/Nexis, and having built an inverted index search, I was predisposed to AltaVista, but, for quite a while after I first used Google, I preferred AltaVista, until it began to die from under-investment. But now, for sure, Google has made the "just throw words at it, never mind spelling" model work really well.

I also recall vastly preferring AltaVista to Google search results, and was very confused when Yahoo switched to Google for it's deep-search. For a long period, it did much better than Google did on search.

Sad story. Digital's best idea for monetizing Altavista was to plug their server hardware to the 0.001% of users who might be in a position to buy some.

If Google truly invented something revolutionary, it was a business model.

While I understand the sympathy here for Google's accomplishments, and don't agree with many of the OP's points - just objectively, it's scary for us all to be dependent on one commercial company. Wether they earned to be in that position or not.

It's also hard to compare things: the scale of the current internet usage, the type of information that is available. (And what can be influenced by showing what).

This scale is much, much wider then what happened to AT&T back in the days. That said, since Apple and MS are also getting away with very similar things, I don't see a point in punishing Google. Especially, as them all being US companies.

The solution of breaking up Google and then putting weaker foreign company in the front-seat, by doing so -- also would not make any sense.

I'm wondering when, if ever, the general public will start recognizing Google as one of the "big brothers". Somehow it's still perceived as this "cool" startup but they squash small businesses, avoid taxes, are in bed with intelligence agencies, etc.

I'm old enough to remember the techies backlash over targeted advertising in Gmail.

It seemed the google's PR started throwing cash at it for years to "educate" the public.

The general public appeared to be a complacent herd of sheep like creatures that would embrace convenience over everything.

Maybe in your circles Google is "cool". In my circles it's necessary evil. The platform/network effect is so strong there is no escaping it. The US is invested my money wise too deep and won't do what they had the backbone to do with SO and the rest.

So, "when, if ever", won't be anytime soon.

Meanwhile, innovation suffers. They killed chat protocols interfaces (pure monopoly abuse since they have most users), the buried end-to-end encryption, they killed bunch of competing businesses by promoting their side businesses on the search page higher, etc.

Http2 could have had things for the users in it (if one goes through the troubles of upgrading a network layer). Instead it had "cut off download at instant if requested" and other features that made web crawling (though not necessarily browsing and developing) easy.

Going forward, they will be cleaning the advertising agency landsccape to get rid out of competition with : Amp ( since they de facto own mobile browsing and Android). Desktop displayed ads (they announced as blocker in chrome, and guess twice whose ads will be allowed through).

I can enumerate all day.

TLDR: they are out of the 'cool' startup area, and firmly into the deep monopolistic abuse waters.

In the 1990s VCs openly stated they would not fund Microsoft competitors. There is a huge hole of companies that never started to compete with Google today, just the VCs don't talk about it today.

Pretty big moat though, right? What would the minimum investment be to build something, for just search, that was technically just on par with Google?

Off the top of my head, few millions in hardware?

Going over people's "Google=internet search"... Infinite? Microsoft is still attempting it.

I meant more about achieving comparable relevancy and feature parity (kg, snippets, widgets). I assume it's a big number since existing players are unable to match those.

Probably, but then, what's the added business value from them really? Few percent at best? Zero at worst?

On a similar note: Yahoo had their "verticals", and when they had to cut something, these search addons were the first to go.

I tried to start a search engine twice so far in fact. The first attempt was a decade ago, for a small country. I had objectively much better and cleaner index then Google. Perfect native language support. All spam removed. Other features that Google didn't.

People have me honest feedback actually (it was a different time for them then). Basically, I got 30 daily users, and a lot of "yes but why bother when Google already exist" type of answers.

What I got out of it, was that technical superiority didn't enter into it. One simply can't break on marketing and business with Google around.

In any case, it was an amazing experience, and a great interview taking point afterwards. Landed me all the jobs I wanted ever since.

So that being said, I don't think the search features matter that much. The mountain to climb over is their integration on Android, inside other services, and more along these lines.

> Before rolling it out, Google asked Warner [CelebrityNetWorth.com] if they could scrape his data and credit him. Warner declined, but Google did it anyway.

Money quote. Google's rich snippets are friendly to users, but hostile to sites where the data originates.

it's the eternal problem with platform-based companies, like Twitter's treatment of developers. Except in Google's case, the platform is the gateway to the internet.

One could argue that if a "business" is only providing one sentence answers to questions then it's not really a business in the first place.

The owner seemed to have found a very small gap and it was closed shortly after.

Google is profiting off those one sentence answers. If it's enough of a business for Google, I suppose it's enough of a business for the people doing the actual work to find the answers.

Are they actually though - in the immediate term? Sure they show ads on the search result, but there's a box with the answer to your query, why would you click an ad?

It seems like the reason it's good for Google is because it's the perfect response to the query and it cements Google as the search engine that can answer my questions.

Are they directly profiting from those queries or are they just making themselves a better search engine, and indirectly profiting from that? If the latter I find it hard to argue against them.

If they are stealing the data in order to make themselves a better search engine, I find that pretty easy to argue against. Someone did work that provides value and Google is taking that data and making it look like their own.

Nobody needs to argue anything. just block google in your robots.txt if you are unhappy. case closed.

What sites need is a happy medium. For Google to index the site, but to not use that same data to eliminate the need for a visit to the site. Content has value. If Google is grabbing that content and using it on their own site, that's a problem.

How are they "hostile to sites where the data originates" when Google is the primary driver of traffic to those sites?

Because they use an algorithm to extract the data that the searcher is looking for and display it on their site, drastically dropping the chances that anyone clicks through to the site.

Whether it's hostile or not, if they continue far enough, it would choke off the sources. People don't tend to invest time in creating content where there's zero chance to interact with the reader, ever.

Create a site that takes search queries, and return scraped Google results data. Become popular. See how long it takes before it gets shut down.

I do get your high level point, but isn't there some quid-pro-quo involved? People allow Google to crawl, which enriches Google's search product. Some traffic is offered in return for helping their index with high quality content.

Edit: If you doubt the effects widgets have on traffic, take a look at what it's done to Wikipedia traffic[1]. The KG entries used to have many, many deep links into Wikipedia. A lot of those links have changed to deep links into Google.

[1] https://www.searchenginejournal.com/wikipedias-traffic-from-...

My default search work-flow is 5 keystrokes+$searchquery which gives me wikipedia results which are not always good, but 90% exactly what I need. I try to minimize my use of Google's services at every opportunity, and I'm aggressive with my router's host file (not to mention uMatrix w/ Chromium and Firefox w/ NoScript/RequestPolicy). It bothers me that I can't black-hole Google's domains on my router's host file w/o screwing up too many websites to count (local to international) because so many have built-in Google web resource dependencies (e.g. googleapis/maps/googletagmanager).

However, I can't believe your argument makes sense to anyone. It seems publisher's want the benefit of Google's traffic w/o having to deal with users preferring not to click-through when they are looking for a 1 sentence answer. There are legit means to preventing Google from indexing one's site.

>when they are looking for a 1 sentence answer.

That's the rub. It's gone way beyond that. Contextually extracted bullet points, full (and sometimes multiple) paragraphs, images, charts, tables, highlighted phrases, etc.

>There are legit means to preventing Google from indexing one's site.

Yes, you can opt of out protection rackets :)

Edit: It's not the only issue with rich snippets. Here's two examples of a "rich snippet" that are bad for everyone: http://imgur.com/a/mpayp http://imgur.com/a/IZmmJ

Both sites being used for the answer are obvious affiliate site that cares only about who is giving out the best commission. Doubtful any info they offer is useful.

Or how about just flat out incorrect facts? http://i.imgur.com/1nNreR2.png

There's nothing more frustrating than someone arguing for a position you yourself favor with terrible, easily-knocked-down arguments. I actually do think Google should be regulated, but the author is putting forward the worst possible case. His theories about first mover advantage and network effects are both ridiculous: Google wasn't even the third search engine in existence, and there are little to no network effects in search. They got where they are from quality of product and economy of scale.

Ryan Cooper, try rewriting this article from the angle of the effects of Google's monopoly, not the causes. The causes angle is more tempting, because we understand that regulation should be avoided, and so if it must be done we want to feel like the company did something "bad" to "deserve it", but that's a fallacy.

I don't understand why this article got so many upvotes.

First, I think the entire premise of the article that Google is not really better than other search engines is wrong. And even if that were true that would not be a case of network effect but just brand advantage.

Next, he goes on the say that Google should be regulated, but doesn't say how. I can't really think of a reasonable way that would solve this problem.

EDIT: After thinking about this, I came up with an interesting (hypothetical) proposal: Google gets split into two companies. Both companies get access to the Google source code and neither of them is allowed to use the Google brand name for search.

This would create competition and solve some of the problems. For instance a website could get delisted by Google A, but still get traffic from Google B. I am not sure if it would be a net positive tough.

What a bunch of bullshit. Google's search engine was far better than it's competitors when it came out, and continues to be. It doesn't (generally) maintain its position through network effects (such as e.g. Facebook does).

> and continues to be

This hasn't been my personal experience, I've been getting better results (the past year or so) with DuckDuckGo.

What is the solution here? Is google supposed to judge for every snippet whether or not it's beneficial for the wider internet? Seems like they cannot objectively make that call. Should rich snippets be illegal? The article presents a problem, but what is the solution?

Aside from the issue mentioned in the article, there's also the issue of how a rich snippet can appear to be a deliberate endorsement by Google. Because the process is automated, with no checks and balances, some odd stuff gets out there.

I also really dislike that often the source of the information is deliberately obtuse.

Even with the Wikipedia snippets, finding the actual link to the article is not quick and easy.

Also, what is the goal of rich snippets for Google?

Making it quicker and easier to find the information you are looking for? Probably... in part.

Reducing the probability that a user actually clicks on a link and keep them right on Google for the next search and ad opportunities? Probably also.

Some fun rich snippets that highlight the sort of clumsy approach Google is taking right now: http://imgur.com/a/6EDEP

Yesterday I have read another submission [0] on HN, linking to an interesting NYT article "Is It Time to Break Up Google?" [1].

Why has it been flagged?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14174460

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/22/opinion/sunday/is-it-time...

Perhaps it was flagged because one of the solutions was to get ride of DMCA Safe Harbour. The author has interest in doing that because he is a film producer

Was this person even around back when Google was first started? I recall routinely using 2-3 search engines just find something trivially easy to find in any modern search engine. The others completely sucked (Excite + Altavista + webcrawler + yahoo was my typical cocktail of search engines, for those wondering).

The service is and was simply the BEST and it always WORKED. People don't seem to remember days when the internet was far less reliable (and less useful).

The railroads were nationalized in the 19th century because of their importance to the economy and their unwillingness to standardize. Is that comparable?

>What gives it roughly 80 percent of the online search traffic is first mover advantage. Back in the mid-'90s[...] Google was just a little bit better than the others

This is bullshit. Yahoo! and Altavista were there before Google. And by calling Google's page rank based search algorithm "just a little better than others" the author reveals his own ignorance.

This jumped out at me too. He's using some terms incorrectly in this article. In the very next paragraph he says

>Back in the mid-'90s when Sergey Brin and Larry Page started the company, there were many other search tools jostling for position.

... which puts a lie to the sentence you quoted.

And then the next point:

>Second, what makes Google's search dominance profitable is network effects. Without a large internet to index, and a huge number of people looking for things online, even the best imaginable search would be worthless.

That's not what people mean when they talk about network effects. The fact that huge numbers of people use Google doesn't make searching with Google more useful, and Microsoft can also index that "large internet" for Bing.

This is the second or third article regarding breaking up the google/facebook ad monopoly that I've read in the past few days.

I'm guessing someone has hired a PR firm to push this idea as it feels like I'm being submarined. http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

I think it's a legitimate question, and probably should be discussed more anyway. The article misses the bigger issue to me though. Their market share in search, browsers, ad networks, maps, phones, and email creates an opportunity for abuse that's unprecedented. I'm worried about what they could do with all that. We depend quite a bit on their internal culture right now to prevent it.

Imagine what a "god mode" app at Google might look like.

Or just people on the media are pissed off. They have that leverage anyway over Google to spread their thoughts through media.

I personally think Google should be separated or made a dumb pipe, this would be the most American thing ever!

The telecoms need to be made "dumb pipe[s]" in the US before we start worrying about Google.

But Google is bigger than U.S.

Globally speaking, they have more influence and power.

>I'm guessing someone has hired a PR firm to push this idea as it feels like I'm being submarined.

By this logic, everything that appears more than 3-10 times in the press has possibly been "submarined".

And yet we can still read his drivel under the suffocating weight that is google! He complains and says that there really ought to be competition but then gives examples of people simply rehashing results from Google - much like er.. Bing did! I too wish someone would provide some actual competition. I'm sure google would too.

I refer the honorable gentleman to my previous answer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14180331

alas, dare we say it: more regulation of these essential services is probably going to be needed at some point. Google is generally a good citizen of the world, but if they weren't, they could shape and control the world in many ways. Shouldn't govmt oversight be involved?

Fake news. First the NYT, now The Week, and tomorrow perhaps the Wash Post. Correspondent's dinner is around the corner and much pain is being felt by traditional media.

This is Google's competitors crying, whining and hoping to influence public opinion. If you don't like Google's search dominance then build a better engine. Users are happy to migrate for more privacy (DDG), a rich UI (Bing), computational power (Wolphram) ... if the search results great. Google's been hammered by FB in social, by AWS in cloud computing, by Office360 in apps, etc., etc. They're not a monolith.

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