The businesses where Google is biggest and the ones where it isn’t
wsj.com
wsj.com
I have a hard time believing their figures,
Youtube is only 4 times bigger than Vimeo?
Well Vimeo is making 100M visit per month [1], Youtube is making 30B [2]
[1] https://www.similarweb.com/website/vimeo.com/#overview
[2] https://www.similarweb.com/website/youtube.com/#overview
Apparently YouTube has 2,485,221 "websites" and Vimeo has 624,352. I have no idea what a website is in Datanyze parlance and can't find anything on their website that explains it. I'm also not sure what the pie chart is which seems to suggest they only have half the market between them while their market shares add up to 92.28%.
I do think Google, and other companies, need to be fundamentally broken up. However, there seems to be some underlying problems in the public market way of life in America that almost forces companies down this path.
I also think we need some broad new antitrust laws. Any market with fewer than 4 competitors is not a competitive market. Any market where a single competitor has more than 50% of the share is not a competitive market.
Google made good products and good services and aggressively defended them through acquisitions and paid placement deals. It may be your opinion that these acquisitions and placement deals are not "dirty" or "underhanded" but I find them to be fairly anticompetitive.
Microsoft used the exact same tactic repeatedly. It's one of the cornerstones of any dominant corporation, to build and leverage moats to keep competition at bay.
Why do you think Google bought Android? Google panicked after seeing a private demo of iOS. Remember, back then Google execs were sitting on the Apple board.
It's like search+ads is such a dang money printer that they just churn products over and over looking for something that goes to the moon and anything that doesn't, even if it would be a stable, competitive, profit-generating product if it were its own company, they just bin it because it doesn't even register on their enormous operating profit from search.
I think that definitely hurts consumers. And isn't that the main measure of if a monopoly is bad? Demonstrating harm to consumers?
A lot of us who are in this forum are here for the "news", not for the "ycombinator".
> “even if it would be a stable, competitive, profit-generating product if it were its own company, they just bin it because it doesn't even register on their enormous operating profit”
Just because a business practice sucks for consumers and it is done by a big company doesn't make it monopolistic. Anti-trust shouldn't be a "free for all gripes welcome" fest.
That's the extra special thing about Google's brand of evil. They were not beholden to the great masses of shareholders or big institutional money. They have less excuse than some other prominent companies, because Larry and Sergey (plus Schmidt) controlled the company courtesy of their stock class arrangement. They were not beholden, they chose to behave evil without the typical shareholder pressure.
Which tells you a lot about these people.
Absolutely false. First, there's no obligation to grow and increase value. Second, Google is controlled by 3 shareholders: Page, Brin, and Schmidt
It's hard to have a nuanced discussion about antitrust in the search market when this case is coming up 2 weeks before the election, and is actually about politically pressuring Google to give the party in power favorable treatment.
This was certainly true 10 years ago, now I can't really tell the difference.
Honestly, I use search engines very little anymore.
SEO games make them almost useless to me. Certain well curated Reddit feeds, and sources where it looks like people give a toss is my preference. IRC, Slack, Discord communities are real time with a person, and probably “better” for discovery.
Let’s throw thousands of years of social evolution in the bin cause some billionaires can afford a lot of computers and exorbitant wages to have unscrupulous randos monopolize our exposure to the world. Ok
Same with FB, Twitter; I’m not finding a need to connect to everyone over their cat pic firehose, and the noise.
Edit: email works great for connecting to academics all over. Networking isn’t just through LinkedIn (which I also don’t use), and Upwork, or www at all. It’s just one of numerous conventions.
I usually end up adding "reddit" to my search terms to avoid crap results on both Google and DDG.
[1]I was very curious about my DDG vs !g searches and ended up making an extension for FF which measures just that - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ddg-stats/
That's crazy. If Google has that power and will to wield it, they could wield it to remove that party from power, so the pressure is zero.
What kind of searches are you making? I switch for fewer than 1% of my searches.
Also, for searches that "really matter" like when trying to get real work done, I end up trying them out in Google anyways to see if I missed anything. At which point, I wonder why I'm using DDG at all.
It did make me hopeful that they're working on something to improve this.
Let's not lie to ourselves. It's the option you prefer, not the only viable one.
It's also a lie to pretend that Google is any more evil than DDG. Both are capitalist corporations marketing a story to convince people to give them money (in this case, to convince you to make money for them). Neither of these organizations have morals, they have profit margins and consumer strategies. "Privacy" is just the tech equivalent of "Organic", a marketing tool to convince you to choose their brand. Eventually Google will get on the "privacy train" and people will completely forget they were "evil", just like with Microsoft. It's all so much Eurasia versus Eastasia.
"I have nothing to hide". Yea, Nah.
More like: "I had nothing to hide, until I did, and then it was too late".
It's been said that "to Google" has generically come to mean "to Search", but I think googling has become a synonym not for "searching" but for "actually finding what you are looking for".
When someone tells you to Google something, they are not telling you to do open ended research, they are telling you that you will definitely find the referenced information if you enter a specific term into the Google search bar.
If someone tells you to Google something it essentially implies that it is already answered and accessible like when asked how to spell a word answering "use a dictionary" means to stop wasting their time essentially.
More broadly, I find that people's frustrations with large tech platforms aren't really related to monopoly at all. Concern is more about the growing reach and prevalence of tech companies. When I talk to people who are pretty heavily aligned with the "tech-lash" they're rarely talking about market share or leveraging dominance in one market for an advantage in another market. More often they're talking about capricious moderation and enforcement of content policies, and the general increase in the influence of tech companies on the products and media we consume.
Anti-trust has limited ability alter the issues that most people have with big tech companies. Serving a broad customer base invariably leads to appealing to the lowest common denominator: no one set of rules will appease everybody, instead you try to develop rules to maximize the set of happy users and minimize the set of unhappy users. The scale of these tech companies necessitate automated rules enforcement, and this inevitably leads to false positives. I find it hard to see why breaking up tech companies would change this. Sure, if a big social media site was broken up into 4 different sites then each one would have a smaller population to manage. But they'd have commensurately less resources to dedicate to that community management, so they'll probably lean on automation just as much.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Please don't cherry-pick the details from an article that you consider important, as the submitted title did ("Google Captures 95% of mobile search traffic and 92% of desktop traffic"). This is a form of editorializing because it frames that as the story for everybody. Titles are by far the most powerful influence on HN, so this is a big deal. We want the content/author to speak for themselves, not go through a layer of filtering by submitters.
If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's great, but do so in the comments. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Prefilling the title with the <title> tag after the URL has been entered and making the title read-only with an explicit action to make it modifiable would go a long way towards achieving what you’re asking for.
As it is, going to submission page does not make this guideline very clear. People see two input fields and simply fill them in as they feel best.
So yes addressing their search domination is one toe of the giant, but it's just a start.
For competition to even be possible Google must open up it's data.
I often hear people say "When you search for XXX the first few results are YYYY" to make a point. What they are telling you about is their bubble.
If Google provided relevant search results, I might give it the benefit of the doubt; but it doesn't.
For my searches, Google's results are such a dumpster fire of spam and cross-promotion that I've gone back to how I used to find information before search engines existed. And when I break down and use a search engine, it's the Duck.
Google doesn't make money from people finding information. It makes money by keeping people on the treadmill of searching for information.
If yes, then the headline is misleading.
(Mobile only headline is fine - 95%).
https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-...
There are some low hanging fruits of problems and the market is dying for a competitor.
Both DDG and Bing are not crappy, they are good but Google is just better. This is a bit like going after Tesla for capturing EV market. One can have dozen other reasons to hate and complain about Google but it is a simple fact that Google search is just too damn good and useful.
I will say that DDG has finally improved to at least providing a random tutorial for the List as its first result, but it still doesn't provide official docs and also suspects I might be asking about trees.
Google consistently understands what's being asked here and knows to rank canonical documentations highly.
In other words, how does ethics feature in your decision calculus?