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Comment by hornbaker | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how many companies Google has wounded/killed with their search infopanels. For example, yesterday I searched for “speedtest” expecting Ookla’s speedtest.net to be the top result. Nope, now it’s a one-click speed test offered by Google at the top. Great for users, devastating for the sites at the top of the SERPs.

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Yellowpages and similar services proliferated about 10 years ago as way to capture passive AdSense revenue, but with many using outdated, incomplete, and often incorrect results. Those thousands of sites are now rendered unnecessary by Google's top box, street view, maps, menus, busy times, and other integrations. There is a clear path by which Google has arguably better served both search and advertising customers, at the expense of the publisher cost center, in this domain.

And someone else could better serve Google's customers by scraping their search results and infopanels and serving up the content without any ads or tracking.

Also, a company could better serve cable customers by recording all their content and stream it to customers charging a low monthly fee.

Neither of these are much different from Google's practices in regards to their info panels.

>And someone else could better serve Google's customers by scraping their search results and infopanels and serving up the content without any ads or tracking.

Unlike your second example, this example doesn't make any sense to me. The amount of effort and infrastructure required to do a decent job at this would surely make it at least as expensive as the way Google does it. How could this be cost-effective without ads? I imagine that the amount of people who'd be willing to pay for the same search results that they could get from Google is in the low single digits.

Why not do it live? Then it would be much more cost effective.

It'd be cheaper, but you can't really make up for a loss on every sale by selling in volume.

If you search "Ookla speed test" or "speed test Ookla", then you get Ookla as the top result without seeing Google's panel.

If you only search for "speed test", you get Google's panel followed by Ookla's. I see nothing wrong with this, they are giving users what they want.

Sure, they put themselves between users and content, and then they decided they should serve the content too.

Amazon discovers the best selling third-party products on it's site, and then makes it's own version of them too. Everybody is doing it.

Pretty soon, 5 companies will be serving up 99.9% of the content on the Internet. Nothing wrong with that.

Nothing anyone here in startup land needs to worry about.

Right?

> Nothing wrong with that. (you are missing the /s) :)

Oligopoly is nearly as bad as Monopoly.

Τechnically once the big4 (plus a couple more) own the 99% of the traffic then we will have monopolies on each areas. Google on Search, Amazon on Shopping, Facebook on Socials, Apple on Phones.

And on the outer circle a parasitic ad/tracking ecosystem working with these 4 monopolies. I am not a pescimist, but as nightmare scenarios go, I take it that this is a plausible one.

Apple will never have a monopoly on phones, but it'll share that honor with Google.

I don't know how you imagine that Apple will have a monopoly on mobile phones. They don't even have a quarter of the market!

When your search "calculator" are you angry that Google displays its own web calculator before returning 3rd party results? These are simple utilities, and I don't see why it's bad for Google to offer is own. In fact for web tests it's more useful to me. Much of what I access is Google services, so testing latency and throughput to their servers is better for me.

Well, as a precedent, the browser ballot screen comes to mind ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu

> The web browser choice screen, also known as the web browser ballot box, was a screen displayed in Internet Explorer that offered ten to twelve browsers in a random order.

Note the "in a random order".

> These are simple utilities, and I don't see why it's bad for Google to offer is own. In fact for web tests it's more useful to me. Much of what I access is Google services, so testing latency and throughput to their servers is better for me.

Small clarification: Google doesn't own the speed test. It owns the speed test client, but it performs the test against a third-party NDT server (an open-source server for bandwidth measurement)[1]. The servers are operated and maintained by M-Lab[2], a third-party consortium of companies of which Google is a member. The servers are all in commercial data centers and are completely separate from any Google service, so the speed test doesn't measure your bandwidth to Google.

[1] https://github.com/ndt-project/ndt

[2] https://www.measurementlab.net/

They aren't just doing it for simple utilities, they are literally trying to create some kind of "box" above search results for every possible query, subjective or objective. "Best movies of 2019", "What are the ingredients of pancakes?", the name of any store, restaurant, location, etc.

And if they are producing results better than the blogspam that ends up in the top result, how is that a bad thing?

They are stealing the (often wrong) answers from the blogspam and putting it in their own box - how is that better? They should just filter out the blogspam - that’s ostensibly what a search engine company should be investing their time doing.

> They are stealing the (often wrong) answers from the blogspam and putting it in their own box - how is that better?

Saves a click and the ordeal of loading a gazillion quasi-malicious ads posing as information. Much better in my book.

It’s slightly better to load the (often wrong) blogspam answers into a box than to link to the blogspam, although in doing so, it gives the wrong answer more authority. It’s much better to actually spend resources to filter blogspam from results and link to quality sites which have done actual research.

Or hobby project land...

There are just 4 companies that supply meat to all of US, there is just one company that supplies like half (or something in that range) of seeds, just 4-5 companies provide cable /internet services...

Monopoly is already a thing. A big part of the world is already controlled by just a handful of mega corporations and possibly just a few hundred ultra wealthy people. The internet is simply mirroring the real world :(

Well corporations on the stock market are essentially reinforcement learning hive intelligence agents that are optimized for growth and profit.

So this is exactly what we’re getting. Megacorps chewing up everything to be as big as they can.

Your examples are even more horrific than what we were talking about in the first place...

With all my respect to startups, I strongly believe that consumers should come first. If a large company can provide a cheaper/better service, then that should be encouraged.

As I see it, almost by definition, startups create their moment in the sun by finding blind-spots in the market. Fair play to the big companies who rise to the occasion and address these user needs once they've been pointed out.

We should not allow an economy where all of the gains from disruptive innovation are effectively subsumed under a few companies that take all the profit with no incentive to innovate on their own. We're already seeing the tech giants eat up every startup they can.

> Sure, they put themselves between users and content, and then they decided they should serve the content too.

Not that I'm a huge Google fan, but without search services like Google, users wouldn't know where content was.

> I see nothing wrong with this, they are giving users what they want.

You're a very odd bird indeed if you think the vast majority of people want severely-biased search results, and for Google to unfairly leverage their search position to kill competition.

>You're a very odd bird indeed if you think the vast majority of people want severely-biased search results, and for Google to unfairly leverage their search position to kill competition.

In the case of the embedded speed test that pops up on Google vs. Oookla, it's not as simple as it might seem.

Google owns the JS widget that performs the test, but the backend server is owned and maintained by M-Lab, a third-party consortium (of which Google is a member).

It's a pretty neat project. The code is all open-source and the raw data of the speed tests is all publicly available and licensed under Creative Commons No Rights Reserved Zero Waiver:

* https://www.measurementlab.net

* https://github.com/ndt-project/ndt

* https://viz.measurementlab.net/

They're giving users what they want now. The reason we have antitrust laws is that unregulated free markets (i.e., "giving users what they want") have some well-known failure modes that produce happy customers and happy sellers until the entire market collapses and customers are no longer getting what they want.

Would you be satisfied if AOL bought out the internet, because that's what users wanted in the 1990s, and Google never had a chance to exist?

I am more sympathetic to google in this case as compared to others where the content provided is sourced by another company. In this case the "speed test" service is provided entirely by google as part of their search product, it doesn't rely on Ookla in some manner to power this service.

It’s the power of Google as a portal to the internet and search engine; clearly it is a powerful position to have: Google can access demand for a service, and once it reaches a certain threshold decide to throw resources at creating their own version to keep you in their ecosystem.

I would like to know what Google team is in charge of using search trends to identify services to offer.

What does Google gain? Maybe some data, and that's probably what this is about, getting speed test data from lots of users. But revenue wise I don't think it gains anything and sties currently offering the service go out of business over night. Why go after Genius, well probably because it has some peripheral business interest like Google music which is benefiting from this behavior.

I can see: speedtest indicates an interest in checking internet service which could lead to internet in Google Fiber in a particular region: assuming GF is still functioning. This is probably a stretch.

Yes, making a node that connects to another service seems like a goal.

Having a good idea of what kinds of internet speeds people have around the world is no doubt hugely useful for all sorts of things like planning Stadia[0]. But moreover, Google is a member of the M-Lab[1] project that runs the speedtest servers, so why not add the feature?

[0]https://stadia.dev/

[1]https://www.measurementlab.net/

Google wants to keep users at google.com so it can keep showing them ads. Each time a user clicks away to speedtest.net or genius.com, that is a missed opportunity for revenue.

Except it's very likely that those 3rd party sites are monetized with Google AdWords. But I guess Google can make a bit more by cutting out the middle man.

> What does Google gain?

~20 years ago some people were wondering what does Google gain from giving free service. The point is Google is trying to be the one stop shop for the whole internet no matter what you need.

Unfortunately I don't see anything changing for Google especially in the US where lobbying is such a cheap way to turn all legislation to their advantage.

It's very similar to what Amazon does. They get information about demand for a certain product, and then make custom versions of the most popular third-party products sold on their site, competing directly with people who sell on their platform.

I wonder how many companies Google has killed by entering the market , setting the price to free and then walking away when bored.

Well, to be fair if they were only surviving because of Google’s SERP listings... it sort of seems like a live by the sword: die by the sword situation.

If Google delisting your site destroys your business, there’s an argument to be made that they also created your business in the first place.

This guy predicted Google SEO bubble http://rajeshanbiah.blogspot.com/2018/01/technology-predicti...

As a user, why should I care? If Google knocks out the competition and the deprecistes it another company will fill that space.

I use a search engine to find information not to find a website that serves that.

(Fyi i don't use good, I'm a ddg user)

Edit: thumbs and smartphone :-)

Voting you up cause you use DDG :-) only

Otherwise I think You would care if Google steals all your hard work.

Well as they scraped most of their data from other sites I wouldn't really call it hard work.

Look I get it and I agree. I was posting from a users point of view. I'll happily accept the downvotes though :-)

It's a joke how trivial it is for Google to destroy these sort of sites.

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