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Comment by SkyPuncher | Hacker News Reader

Yes, Google owns a significant portion of search but I don't think it qualifies as a monopoly.

* They have no exclusive rights to "search". Bing, DDG, Yahoo, and more all compete in the same space.

* They do not have a geographic right to any areas.

* They are not prevent me from using another search engine

I choose to use Google because it gives me the results I expect. Nobody is forcing me to use Google over other search engines. If anything, Google has raised the quality for all search engines by consistently producing the best product available.

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None of those things necessarily constitute a monopoly - but when barriers to entry are too high to facilitate other entrants, when they have first dibs on all of the talent, deep lobbying power etc. then it can become monopolistic.

A good example is their commoditization of adjacent economies: they give Android away for free to make sure that there are few competitors who can make a dime there. Apple, the biggest company on the planet, being the only one who can hold a toe in that market.

Similarly as the default search engine on Chrome - Google definitely wants to make sure browsers are 'free' 'open source' etc so they can fuel the dominant entity and make sure the surpluses are captured in search, not elsewhere.

Microsoft would use their monopoly power in one area (OS) and leverage that into monopoly in other areas, i.e. office software.

If GM, Ford and Daimler Chrysler were to merge, they would be a monopoly even though the merged entity wouldn't meet any of the criteria you've highlighted.

Google can't necessarily be described in network effects either, but generally the very fact of their market penetration almost proves that there are systematic barriers.

They make gazillions of dollars - so why aren't there gazillions of competitors and tons of choice? Because of those barriers.

And they will keep extending themselves as they see fit to use billions of dollars to either dominate - or remove all surpluses form adjacent industries, thereby leaving the surpluses in their core offer, like search.

If you take a minute to consider why in 'free trade' deals, nations that participate are forbidden from government intervention in local companies. It's not really 'free trade' if for example the government can use tax base from the broader economy to support a strategic players and enable them to 'dump' their product on the market at what would otherwise be below market value. In that context, Google could be described as 'dumping' Android and Chrome on the market in some sense.

It's definitely grey but I think it's reasonable to consider Google as a monopoly.

Are there actually barriers to search? I feel like I could start writing a web crawler and index the results with little/no real problem, other than how much worse I would be at it than Google is.

Does being really good at something actually constitute a barrier for others? Practically, it definitely does, but wouldn't any check on that provide some pretty perverse incentives?

Also, I don't think GM, Ford and Daimler Chrysler would merge to become a monopoly. Volkswagen, Honda, BMW all would still provide stiff competition.

The thing we care about w/r/t monopolies is the stifling of innovation. Do you think innovation is being stifled, in any of the areas Google has products in? I largely do not.

Crawling the web is very resource intensive. You'll need thousands of machines, and probably a pretty sizable IPv4 allocation to go with that. You'll find that people allow GoogleBot and maybe a few other crawlers, but don't allow you -- because crawling causes too much load on their site.

Once you have a snapshot of the web, you have two problems. The first is that your snapshot is out of date; you're going to have to continuously update it. The second is you have to figure out how to turn that enormous data into something useful. That's probably going to take thousands more servers, plus or minus lots of development to figure out what's useful.

And then, if you do manage to decent results, you have two more problems. speed -- to compete with Google, you need to be fast, and to be fast, you need to be close to users, which means you need datacenters spread throughout your market area. Even if your results are objectively and subjectively better if blind compared, people are going to prefer the google results because they have google branding.

It's not an insurmountable barrier, but it's pretty big.

None of this sounds like "barriers" in the sense that I need to do any of this to release a search engine. My engine may be utterly terrible, but the barriers aren't to entry, they're to competence.

That seems fine to me. You have to be better than the competition to enter the market, or have some kind of innovation that obsoletes their business method. Makes sense!

This needs to be repeated because it helps to understand the issue.

There are only four (4) search indexes of sufficient size in English, these are Bing, Google, Baidu (Chinese), and Yandex (Russian).

Everything on the internet that calls itself a "search engine" gets its search result data from one of those four indexes. Different front ends provide different features around the results, whether it is privacy enhancement, ad enhancement, Etc.

Google's English language index is generally considered the 'best' based on the depth of the index with respect to its crawl size and that index's ability to provide both good precision and recall.

You can use any search site you want but you will likely be using Google search results. If you feel like you're results aren't quite as good as Google's, and you are in the US, you are probably using Bing. Neither Baidu nor Yandex have US data centers so latency to their indexes is pretty bad for most front end web sites.

This is incorrect, not everything on the internet that calls itself a search engine get their results from one of those four. There's also Exalead, Gigablast, Mojeek and Findx for example.

Disclaimer: I work for Mojeek so know that it only gets results from it's own index.

That is awesome love that you've crossed a billion pages in the index. I worked at Blekko (VP Eng/Ops) and at its peak it had about 5 billion pages indexed, and that is pretty good for targeted search. It loses on the long tail though for generalized search.

Something we did at Blekko which was really interesting/helpful was to feed a search query to our index, Bing's, and Google's and then compare the results. That was a great way to compare notes on ranking strategies between the three engineering teams.

[1] "In 2015, Mojeek's index surpassed the billion pages, the only search engine in the UK to accomplish this and one of just a handful worldwide to maintain an index of this size (English language). Although, passing this milestone is only the first step and Mojeek is continuing to increase its index size and improve relevancy." -- https://www.mojeek.com/about/technology.html

Thanks for the info. Marc (who created Mojeek) mentions Blekko a lot as he considers yourselves to be the last ones so far to have a proper go at creating a search engine from scratch. Also, we're now up to 2.2 billion pages and it's only a lack of servers that stops us from increasing at a much faster pace.

For what its worth, this is the ultimate calculus for a search engine; The revenue you can produce is proportional to your query rate, your query rate is proportional to your recurring user base, and your recurring user base is proportional to the usefulness of your searches, which is proportional to the number of pages in your index which is proportional to the number of servers you have running which is proportional to the cost of running the service.

One of the things I would have done differently at Blekko is that I would have created our own in house ad serving system (network) way earlier in the life cycle (Blekko never did have an in house ad network). It gives you better control over advertising latency and the quality factor of the ads. You also get to keep all of the ad revenue rather than just some of it. And you can deal directly with advertisers rather than the ad-tech crowd which can be quite scummy at times.

I wish you the best of luck in your endeavor, if you can crack the secret of surviving in a market where Google pays people over $4B/year just to send their search traffic to them, then you will be one of my heroes.

DuckDuckGo have their own crawlers right?

They used to, but now they don’t.

Do you have a source link where I could read up on this? It would seem that DuckDuckBot is still alive and well.

https://duck.co/help/results/

> We source from Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex.

(which is kind of funny because Yahoo forwards (forwarded?) all their search traffic to Bing per their agreement with Microsoft when Microsoft didn't buy them. Not sure what Verizon does with that now.

From https://duck.co/help/results/sources:

> DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we source from Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex.

Interesting that DuckDuckBot is now relegated to Instant Answers.

a monopoly is not defined by the things you list. it is instead defined by the ability to exert disproportionate power on a market, enough to create favorable conditions for itself (i.e., it's anti-free market).

it's usually characterized by a large, but not necessarily majority, market share in a given industry or segment (monopolies can have as little as 30% market share), and pricing power, both of which google has in search.

What is the search pricing power?

the ability to order search results and to choose when and where to display ads provides pricing power for google's many forms of advertising.

and google is relatively immune to the reactions of it's competitors, like bing, in how it prices its ads.

But this is true of all websites. Are you suggesting that AdWords (not AdSense) holds a plurality market share of the online ad industry? Or that search result ads should be evaluated as their own industry? The first is I believe just not true, and the second seems like an issue of p-hacking your way to a monopoly.

Nobody made anyone use the telephone network either. There were alternative, less preferred methods of long distance communication. But once an incumbent builds in self-reinforcing network effects--be they telephone lines or a rich network of data--they are able to leverage it to immense strength, left unchecked.

That'd be like saying Search isn't a monopoly because a library lets people find information too. No one is making anything even close to that argument, so your post is just a strawman.

Search isn't a monopoly because there are other companies that do nearly the same thing, that customers can switch to them at nearly 0 cost.

A monopoly doesn't mean users don't have choice! Like the car manufacturing example, there are economies of scale that let Google build up external barriers and dictate anti-competitive behavior because of the dominance in the market. It isn't about user choice, it's more about website owner choice.

To play off the merged car company metaphor, imagine if 80% of all cars were Ford. And Ford comes out with an electric car that is really efficient (AMP), but it really only gets that added boost if every gas station in America install a special Ford Pump that charges cars in 2 seconds. And the gas station doesn't get any money from the pumps, but since 90% of cars are Ford they better install those pumps if they want to sell chips and soda in their little store. Otherwise, everyone will just use the gas station across the street.

But hey, no one is making them install those Ford Pumps! And it's great for Ford owners... until all the gas stations start to close.

AMP is bad enough, but having it influence pagerank means Google is leading websites to accept AMP or immediately lose Google traffic. And because Google is dominant in providing traffic to sites, there is very little choice here for site owners and no benefit.

I think where we disagree is "do nearly the same thing". If Google search results are qualitatively better than those of their competitors, to the point it's a different product, it's a monopoly. You are free to disagree on that, but that doesn't make my argument a straw man.

Hence the geographic control comment. There's a reason utilities are often considered natural monopolies.

From the perspective of a website developer, Google has a monopoly.

From the standpoint of the consumer they may not have a monopoly, but from the standpoint of the website they do.

The website makes effort to please Google because Google is the user's freely chosen search agent. If the users en masse chose Bing or Oath/Yahoo or DDG instead (or in addition), the website would make effort to please them instead.

Nothing you’ve said contradicts the argument that they have a monopoly over websites. The fact is, is that people once chose their search engine and today they no longer make that choice even if they have the ability to exercise it.

AFAIK all these - Bing, DDG, Yahoo, and more all compete in the same space. - are simply a single search engine (Bing) with some additions over the top. I suspect that there are about 4 true search engines remaining in the world, two of which are strictly regional (Baidu and Yandex) and Bing is only remaining afloat due to sheer willpower of MS which may end abruptly, as with some other products. I consider this state (with all other factors) as effectively a monopoly.

Just look at this graph from June 2018:

https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/graph/png/Web_sear...

Qwant is another competitor in that space, too.

Isn't Qwant also Bing inside plus additional stuff, just like DDG?

Ahahahahah!

A monopoly, or cartel, is a business that keeps competitors from entering the fray.

Please go on the street corner with your WLAN and portable server to offer search/CDN and whatever, and you'll quickly attract government thugs who will shut you down for lack of permission from the monopoly bureau (Govt regulation). So Yes it is a big, fat, and really fucking juicy monopoly. That's what govts and big corps all are, a big bunch of fascists handing each other 'licences' stipulating their exclusive self-granted right to do x or z.

It’s interesting how all these points would be super simple to validate a decade ago.

> They have no exclusive rights to "search". Bing, DDG, Yahoo, and more all compete in the same space.

They sponsor firefox and safari, so have exclusive rights on the default settings though.

Bing can’t be the default search engine on anything with more than 10% user share.

> They are not prevent me from using another search engine

Android system search is locked at the maker level if they include Google Play, and isn’t bootloader locking becoming the norm, worsening the locking ?

> They sponsor firefox and safari, so have exclusive rights on the default settings though.

"They pay to be the default so no one else can" is kind of a silly argument. If Yahoo had paid more and/or hadn't had terrible results, it probably still would be the default.

And they have the money to pay for placement because they make more money from search because everyone uses Google already... hmm.

If everyone likes Google best, why do they bother paying anything for the default settings? Or are they simply protecting their dominant position by using their dominant position?

Each of those points could have been made about Windows at the time (considering Mac), yet the European antitrust commission decided it was a monopoly and fined them. Quite seriously, if memory serves.

Where do those rules come from? Are they part of the official definition for monopoly? Why did the EC not deem them relevant (enough) when ruling against Microsoft? Why would they not do the same with Google (if ever relevant)?

Is there official reading on this?

Google to me seems like a case of natural monopoly[1]. Competition in this market is stifled by the amount of investment and infrastructure needed to make a good search engine.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

It's a de facto monopoly.

"Monopoly" now seems to mean "preferred by most people."

Or "too big for me to disrupt from my garage."

A lot of reasons search space is nearly impossible to disrupt now has to do with accidental complexity, and Google had a hand in forming many standards and trends that proliferated it.

I don’t think anti-monopoly laws were intended to prevent the physical enslavement of customers who are begging to stop using a certain project but are forced to continue.

It’s common sense. Sometimes profit-seeking companies amass an amount of power within the market that allows them to do things that are bad for their customers, bad for the market, or bad for society. Because we don’t have modern regulations in this country (sadly, Elizabeth Warren’s efforts in this direction will be thwarted by the corrupt legislators her laws would target), the cult of “delivering value to shareholders” often distorts the behavior of companies in this direction.

I’m not sure about Google, but it’s a totally reasonable to be asking these questions. Whatever term you want to use, Google could have a big enough influence on the market to create outcomes (like AMP!) that are conspicuously shitty for people who use the Internet overall. That’s really important and we should stop them if that’s happening.

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