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Comment by xg15 | Hacker News Reader

Google doesn't keep others out of the search market through any other means than just being better...

They have 98% market share in europe. They also provide the main revenue source (AdWords) and the most important implementation of the web stack (Chrome) - which fitted with mandatory automated updating. If you combine those factors, they are in a position where they can to a large part dictate what the de-facto standards for a successful website are. They can also rapidly change those standards or choose to promote or bury certain technologies.

If that is not an advantage over competitors, I don't know what is.

And this is just for the web. On Android - about half the worldwide market for mobile apps - they are not even a market participant at all. They are basically the government.

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Quick experiment you can try to check if Google is blocking competition:

1) navigate to bing.com

2) do a search

If it works, congratulations; Google isn't blocking competition. The 98% market share is probably because the market is winner-take-all, and people don't see a need to use a new competitor that's even equivalently-effective over one they are already comfortable with.

Imagine you run a website. Some day, for whatever reason, Google is blacklisting you. Are you going to say "eh, no big deal, I'll just have my customers use Bing instead"?

You deserved it because you served an ad that google didn't like the style of. Also their adblocker in chrome is fine too because that's not a conflict of interest.

- typical HN response.

Your customers already know how to get to your website: yourdomain.com.

Do you mean "Some day, for whatever reason, Google stops directing traffic to your website of people who don't know who you are, for free?"

Sounds like it's time to spend some money on advertising.

Their ability to kick a bunch of traffic towards you or refrain from doing so makes them a market-maker, but they share that with newspaper and television networks. It doesn't make them a monopoly. It's not their fault or responsibility if people don't "tune in" to the Bing channel.

You haven’t interacted with many average users, have you? When instructed to go to “yourdomain.com”, they’ll bring up google and search for yourdomain.com. If it doesn’t appear in google search results, it effectively doesn’t exist to an enormous segment of users.

I'm the past, we solved problems like this by having industry groups pony up money to educate consumers about options.

Sounds like it's time for companies that can't get in Google search results to start doing ad spots about search engine choice.

Market share does not equal monopoly. Why aren’t Europeans building better search? It isn’t because of Google, it’s because of the risk-adverse tendencies of investors in Europe. If you pitched a search engine to a Euro-VC, you wouldn’t even get asked for a deck. Europe isn’t very innovation driven: they prefer the 2x rather than the 200x. The proof is simple: just look at the flow of European investment money: rarely do they invest in high-risk, high-reward ventures. While in the US, you can raise money for almost anything.

Ok, we built our awesome EuroSearch. How do we get it on the start pages of Firefox, Chrome and Android?

By also building the awesome EuroBrowser? It worked for Google, just saying

Firefox has had different default search engines in the past. At one point Yahoo was the default, and I believe it varied by continent.

Ubuntu once switched from Google to Yahoo in its Firefox as the default search engine, citing higher payments from Yahoo.

Pay higher referral fees. Or did you think Firefox used Google search for free?

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