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Comment by mrtron | Hacker News Reader

Not only can you switch instantly from Google to Bing, you can do the same with the indirect competitors such as yelp.

Yelp claims Google is hurting consumers because often Yelp's results are better than what Google displays as their own Location results above.

Is it really hurting a user to have to scroll slightly down? Or if Yelp's results were really better would users not go directly there or use their apps as an alternative?

I find it very interesting you can claim Google has a monopoly on the web + mobile, which seems to be the necessary premise to make these claims.

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Not only can you switch instantly from Google to Bing, you can do the same with the indirect competitors such as yelp.

That argument is quite compelling for search, where switching is easy and other search engines are going to give you fairly comparable results most of the time. But search isn't the only market Google is in. In the advertising market the "just switch" argument doesn't hold as much weight in my opinion: what good is switching to an advertising network that doesn't generate any views? If Google can dominate advertising and analytics due to their search monopoly, does any other advertising platform stand a chance?

Disclaimer: I've never been a Google customer, and I don't really know how much competition they have in the advertising market, so I don't know how much ability they have to jack up prices etc.

it's anti-competitive. the question is not whether it's hurting consumers directly, but whether it is stifling competition in the spaces that Google enters, which then indirectly hurts consumers -- a lack of competition, the theory goes, slows down the pace of innovation, and gives dictatorial control over a market sector to one actor. bundling IE with Windows didn't directly hurt the consumer, either (and for a long time, IE was the best browser available on Windows), but it didn't stop the DOJ from pursuing Microsoft over it.

given how steeply traffic falls off as you get farther down a SERP (see, to name the first page I found searching for "serp clickthrough", http://www.pagetrafficbuzz.com/understanding-google-serp-cli...), it's hard to argue that (theoretically) practices which unjustly downrank non-Google properties would not constitute anticompetitive behavior when Google has a 65%+ share of search.

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