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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

Facebook. Google will point to facebook's news feeds and internal mechanism as evidence that Google is not alone in terms of news and information linking. Similarly, there are many legitimate competitors in search. DuckDuckgo is a minor player, but microsoft's Bing isn't.

I think that Google is far too big, but I just don't see an antitrust case in the areas of news or search. Oldschool advertising would seem an option but that is a decreasing area, not the place to make real change going forwards imho. I'd like them to break up youtube, but there too Facebook's video sharing is a valid competitor.

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> DuckDuckgo is a minor player, but microsoft's Bing isn't.

DuckduckGo, Qwant, and Bing are all the same player.

DDG and Qwant just pull Bing results.

Bing is the only real competitor to Google.

>or search.

Erm. I think it's absolutely there on search. The existence of competitors doesn't negate monopoly status.

And the accusation can be legitimately claimed, that they use their monopoly status in one market (search) as leverage to give other services in different markets a leg up over the competition.

MS can't leverage Bing for the same - no matter how integrated Bing might be into other products.

If Google tells people to use AMP or be de-ranked, that's monopoly power. Flat out.

>DDG and Qwant just pull Bing results.

It there a source for this? People keep saying that DDG is just Bing, but I can't find any indication of that actually being true. Sure, they may be using Bing results, but they're seem to be mixed with result from other sources.

The only post I ever found on the subject is Gabriel Weinberg saying that DDG is not just Bing.

DDG use a combination of Bing, Oath (previously Yahoo), and their own crawler [1], although I believe their own crawler is only used for “instant answers” and knowledge cards.

Qwant has their own crawler and use Bing to help build their results, at least for now [2].

[1]: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so... [2]: https://help.qwant.com/help/overview/how-does-qwant-index-th...

So neither "just pull Bing results."

In practice - aside from instant answer functions, the amount from which Bing results and DDG vary, is so infinitely small as to be hardly noticeable.

Yahoo just pulls Bing results.

The internet is huge. Flashcards/instant answers is a tiny rounding error compared to the information in the searchable web. DDG uses bing for the actual search and their own stuff for flashcards.

Yeas, for russian segment it is Yandex. There is basically 4 real search engines left in the world - Google, Bing, Yandex, Badoo.

Baidu in China too, but like Yandex it's another region where Google has struggled to establish a strong presence.

I think "Badoo" above was a typo for "Baidu"

Also Seznam, which is basically the Czech Republic's Yandex.

DDG is deceptive about their sources.

For example, DDG says they aggregate search results from Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex. Well, Yahoo switched to Bing search results about a decade ago, and Yandex is only really useful for Russian websites. So unless you're searching in Russian, you're getting Bing search results.

DDG also claims they index hundreds of independent sources - by which it means individual web pages. By that logic, Google and Bing index billions of sources compared to DDG's four hundred or so, which end up being redundant to Bing's indexed results anyways.

The only activity I've seen from their crawler is fetching home pages to source the favicons of the site - which they display next to results. They don't appear to crawl the web to index it.

If there aren’t laws damning this style of business there should be. The amount of power focused in such a few people can only have catastrophic effects on society.

>DuckDuckgo is a minor player, but microsoft's Bing isn't.

Bing has 5% market share of search.

You also don’t see Microsoft leveraging the 5% market share to create competing businesses and then self bidding on search engine keywords to bid up the costs to existing customers.

The problem is google has a dominate market share and unfairly leverage its dominate market position to the determinate of other businesses and consumers. Say I’m an airline and use google ad words and pay $2 pay per click for the term “x”, google knows I can afford to pay more, so they create a spin off company and they bid up “x” to force me to pay google more for the same AdWord or lose out to Google’s new flight aggregate business. Either way this drives up costs to consumers and is unfair to a competitive business landscape.

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