In some cases it's almost all of the above the fold real estate and for shopping they are starting to take over the checkout experience as well.
It's significantly reducing organic traffic and turning e-commerce sites into Google suppliers.
I do wonder how sustainable it is, previously these aggregators did lots of things at Google's request, cleaning the noise out and laying everything out in nice data-annotations. More fool them, it turns out.
Google cross-references them all, builds their 'own' data and drives them all out of business.
It's pretty scary how much of the digital high streets Google has ruthlessly stolen from us all, and imposing a huge tax for doing pretty much sod all.
I occasionally wonder if anyone would every have the balls to nationalise the search engine, it should be a public utility, not infested with ads covering 90% of the first page as it's become. I'm even semi-serious :)
At the very least I wouldn't mind a nice ruling that Google are now deceptively calling themselves a search engine, and that they can now only show one ad per 10 real results per page.
Amazon uses marketplace to access markets without risk or their own suppliers (making them a one stop shop in the process), then once they have the data, they start selling the stuff directly.
I worked in a music instrument retailer, when Amazon was aggressively trying to capture that industry, and they did start selling through Amazon, and if course Amazon now sells most stuff themselves now.
The problem as I see it is that these gradual monopolies pose huge risks to freedom and choice, as they lobby for themselves, and own bigger chunks of the world. Incentives change once you own entire markets, and it's naïve to think what started as a better experience for users will stay that way with less competition.
Not sure what can be done though. Antitrust stuff is really the last resort, and it's not a guarantee that it will even happen. In the EU it probably will I guess. USA not do sure.
Most regulations seemingly aimed at taming monopolies only end up reinforcing them, because megacorps have the means to circumvent/malleate regulations, while small firms do not.
The common-sense implicit mental model of the commercial playing field is a flat market with relatively fixed rules, with an enforcer of market rules (the state). Such a playing field would naturally disfavor unfair monopolies (i.e. those that aren't based on network effects, economies of scale, or superior talent).
Obviously, reality is very different: the market rules can be rewritten, and the entity in charge of rewriting them is itself a monopoly. So to prevent unfair monopolies, we would have to make that common-sense mental model a reality, which entails reworking national governance itself.
Microsoft was so close to being broken up for this long ago but now everyone does it...so why do we allow it?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosia https://de.blog.ecosia.org/ecosia-finanzberichte-baumplanzbe... (in German)
If money was not spent and they used an existing uniform to keep costs low, critics would complain that the uniform does not match the environment.
If money was spent to design a new uniform that matched the environment, critics would complain that money was wasted on uniforms and they would probably acknowledge the comicality of thinking that a uniformed soldier in space would care about camouflage instead of things like breathing and wondering why they're in uniform in the vacuum of space.
Either way, critics will complain and Space Force personnel will continue to exist in desks for the conceivable future, so uniforms should clearly have been optimized for comfort.
Few dispute the military should have some people who do space stuff, many dispute that they should be on equal footing administratively to the rest of the military.
> For now, the 16,000 active-duty airmen and civilians who work at Air Force Space Command will be assigned to the Space Force, but nothing else will change. Uniforms, a rank structure, training and education are all to be determined, and for the foreseeable future, Space Force will continue to be manned by airmen...
> Meanwhile, U.S Space Command, which stood up in August, will continue to exist as a combatant command, similar to Cyber Command, Special Operations Command and others.
> Barrett will be the Space Force’s service secretary, as the service will be nestled within the Air Force Department, the same way the Marine Corps is part of the Navy Department.
> Eventually, she said, those services’ space commands will be rolled into Space Force, and those personnel will transfer branches. In the more immediate future, officials said, soldiers and sailors could be detailed to Space Force.
https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-military/2019/12/21/...
In space you are so much more vulnerable than in any conceivable environment on earth. Survival depends on others not having layers of other agendas, several of which may be to find ways to kill you.
Imagine how much space exploration will cost if not only do you need to get to space, but you need to bring defensive and offensive weapons as well.
Consider that air forces throughout the world wear blue uniforms, yet no individual in uniform is ever going to attempt to camouflage themselves against the sky...
Similar to the way weather data is collected by the government, and multiple private companies use it to produce their own sites and forecasts, you could have different search engines doing different interesting things with the data: compete on UX, or focus on particular niches of search.
As it stands today, we have a Bing-Google duopoly because indexing the whole web is such a massive undertaking.
Are we a few years away from Google Recipe Search?
I have since taken all of the microdata out of the HTML. If google wants it, it can pay for it.
... and the users of Google. Being able to see things like calorie counts directly in search results is awesome. Seriously, if you Google "banana bread" you get recipe ratings, cooking time, and calories right in the list of results. The UX is exceptional.
Is having a natural approach to food no longer normal?