The Elephant in the Room: Google Monoculture
codinghorror.com
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It would be interesting to see some updated numbers on this, especially from SO. While I don't imagine many programmers are using Bing, it would be interesting to see where DuckDuckGo ranks.
In fact, I've just searched for a bunch of queries that I assume would have plenty of bidders (NFL, football, harry potter, ipad) and none of them had any ads box.
Google 69,081,674 visits
Bing 520,543 visits
Baidu 319,294
Search (CBS) 176,208
Yahoo 133,833
MSDN 109.875
Yandex 80.399
Naver 89,733
Ask 30,026
DuckDuckGo 25,492
AOL 6,409
Daum 4,462
Blekko 659This same bias that selects the population will affect the choice of which search engine to use.
We have other sites (cooking.stackexchange, diy.stackexchange) that are much more representative of the population at large. Even on those sites, you see a similar ratio... the second largest search referrer sends 1.6% as much traffic as Google (about twice as much as it sends to StackOverflow, but still virtually insignificant.)
Clearly Google has an obvious and overt lead in all categories, and all search. I'm not sure how you can refute that the set of visitors to one site is not a biased sample compared to all Internet users.
Your results are different than other published search engine use comparisons. If both are factual, then the measurements must come from different populations.
Link please?
The traffic for my site isn't as extreme as the stack exchange, but I'm seeing 9 times more traffic from google than bing. This leads to the same conclusion that Jeff came to. If Bing stopped sending me traffic tomorrow I wouldn't care. If google stopped sending me traffic I'd lose nearly all of my traffic.
Since stackexchange is mostly targeted at the former, I'd expect your numbers to be skewed in interesting ways, which you could partially correct by looking at homepage visits to capture the latter use. (This is a big confounding variable whenever people try to measure comparative statistics between search engines. I've heard that Yahoo and Bing get many more one-word searches than Google, which are likely to be of the spell-corrected dns kind.)
Now that they're not doing that anymore, I'll arrive by google most of the time.
Are they? I can easily imagine it being the other way around. I don't see how general population would know about other search engines or even consider that Google != Internet.
But of course, without hard data the whole topic is groundless.
Actually, that leads me to a more relevant question: looking through the queries that landed visitors at SO, have you done some scraping to determine what proportion were people googling errors verbatim, and what percentage were people asking questions or googling a particular topic, eg "scaling rails"?
As it's full of user-contributed content which is outside the control of the Chinese state it wouldn't surprise me one bit if it was.
Maybe people weren't so up in arms because of Microsoft's monopoly, but rather what they were doing with it. Apple didn't have a monopoly when I stopped being a fan.
I'm not a huge fan of Google, but if you're a startup you don't fear Google the way you would have feared Microsoft in the 90's. And if you're afraid of Google, it's because of legitimate competition in the marketplace, not nefarious anti-competitive practices.
[+] Edit: As pointed out below, the "sitting on their thumbs" may just be local lore, and not true.
Why not pay them to build better development tools rather than to sit on their thumbs?
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-279561.html
"Yocam maintains that Microsoft is luring personnel away with huge signing bonuses, some in excess of $1 million."
On a brighter note, Borland may have lost but silicon valley ultimately won when Google's incredibly fast growth prevented Microsoft from pulling a Borland on Google's search engine team.
Microsoft Labs has been among the more phenomenally unproductive corporate R&D operations of all times. The amount of talent that was sucked in there ... never to be heard from again, boggles the mind.
I'm not convince that this was a deliberate strategy, but it seems reasonably plausible.
Also, if you're referring to Anders Hejlsberg, being the lead architect of C# doesn't qualify as "sit on their thumbs". Considering that .NET is one of the 2 competitive advantages that Windows still has in the corporate environment (the other being Exchange), I think it was a million dollars well spent.
Which is not to say that Microsoft didn't abuse their monopoly, but this particular story.... I've never heard it and it doesn't sound right.
Read the stories from last summer about bonuses being paid to employees coming and going from Google, Facebook, Twitter?
ASP.NET on IIS on Windows Server.
There is nothing wrong with monopolies, they are a natural part of a healthy economy and they are everywhere around us.
The problem is when companies abuse of that monopoly to gain unfair advantages in other markets. That's what Microsoft did. So far, Google hasn't shown any sign of doing such a thing.
Obviously, we should keep being vigilant.
Trust me as some one who worked for a regulated company you REALY REALY dont want to go there - develope a product and your not sure if the regulator will let you launch it
But I don't think it's so much a monopoly on search that's interesting, as it is a monopoly on entry. Google is everyone's front door to the Internet. There are a few geeks like us who know about URLs and TLDs, but generally people just google what they're looking for.
And on that note, I think there are other monopolistic gates to the internet being opened. Like the portals of old, Facebook is setting itself up to be the other Front Door on the Internet. Part of that is wrapped in what people care about most: other people. So it makes sense that you go to Google for things, places, and ideas; and you go to Facebook for people.
Google realized it was missing that category of nouns and built Google+. Facebook knows it's missing a lot beyond people and is looking to expand into other nounish categories, but it's also looking to expand into verbs: listen, watch, read.
I don't think Google has a monopoly forever -- I think it's fighting tooth and nail to stay at the top. I think there is fierce competition going on at all levels here, Facebook being the obvious example. And let's not forget Apple, Comcast, and other media providers who are using their control of media experiences to leverage control over people's experience of the Internet.
The future is going to be interesting!
The reason Google is the search leader is not because nontechnical people don't know of the alternatives. It's the leader because it's synonymous with search and people think it's the best.
This is both the beauty and terror of Google's business model. Don't be evil?
Microsoft wasn't a monopoly because their software pervaded rampantly; Microsoft was a monopoly because their entire business model bastardized the notion of vertical integration by making alternate software (ie competition) impossible, furthered by the costs of developing IE being (allegedly) baked into Windows.
Is the "Google = Monopoly" argument that their bundling of GMail/Search/Plus/etc./etc. is discouraging competition?
Microsoft was a monopoly because they sold 95+% of the operating systems on computers. Microsoft was convicted not of being a monopoly, but of abusing the monopoly.
It is also interesting to observe that while Microsoft may have done some immoral things to obtain that monopoly (depending on how you look at it), that doesn't make the things they did before they had a monopoly illegal, or at least not for reasons of having a monopoly. Special scrutiny and rules are put in place for monopolists. Thus, it became illegal to bundle IE with Windows in some places, but that was a special ruling for MS only as a consequence of their monopoly status, it was not a general legal restriction against bundling.
The claim that Google is a monopoly on search is simply an observation that they are servicing the vast, vast majority of searches. It does not logically follow that they are doing anything wrong; that is something that must be established separately. I for one don't see much evidence for Google abusing their monopoly in illegal or immoral ways. (Most of my complaints would center more around resting on their laurels, such as with their notoriously bad customer service, but there's nothing particularly illegal or immoral about that....) It is also valid to be personally concerned about the presence of a monopoly, even if it is not doing anything particularly wrong.
The common category collapse of "monopoly" and "illegal monopoly" makes it hard to understand what's really going on.
I think the point of the article is to say that Google isn't abusing their monopoly power (by many people's standards), but that Google is nonetheless a monopoly and if they delist your site or otherwise abuse their power, you no longer exist as a viable business.
We even have a recent example of this in the spat between Twitter and Google over Google+ results in search. Google is hiding behind the "you put 'nofollow' on them" line, but it seems a tad dishonest. Really, "nofollow" gets used to say "don't give them SEO points for this link". Even if one considers Google's position completely legitimate, it's also quite handy for Google. Now their Google+ service gets promoted over a competitor. Google's decision here is a use of their position to hurt a competitor.
In fact, it's a lot like the Netscape situation. There's legitimacy to not indexing the Twitter content labeled with "nofollow" or integrating your own competitor right into your product. This is the same argument that Microsoft used about Internet Explorer. When a company has 10% of the market, we don't need to scrutinize so much. They don't have a lot of power. When a company controls such a high proportion of an industry, that changes.
The author rightly identifies that if Google moves against you in their search index, it basically eliminates your business. There are always reasons. I'm glad about the moves Google has made against spammers in their index recently. However, when looking at the Twitter situation, I feel less positively. I personally don't use Twitter (or Google+), but I can recognize that Google's market dominance in search is going to hurt Twitter and promote their own competitor. Google+ may be better and there may be good technological reasons for the integration and the non-indexing of Twitter links, but when you're as dominant of search as Google is, I think a bit more scrutiny is warranted. Likewise, when Microsoft was so dominant of operating systems and started integrating their own browser into the OS, it was scrutinized. That doesn't mean there wasn't good technological reasons for the integration, just that Microsoft was of a size where it eliminates the viability of competitors.
I have a lot of respect for Google and none of this is meant to sound anti-Google. At the same time, I agree with the author's premise that Google is so dominant of search that they could eliminate the viability of your business via their search index. That doesn't mean that they would do that. However, I think it means that certain moves should be viewed as being made by the only company in the industry - not one made by a single company among many competitors. And before one says "there's lots of alternatives like Bing, DDG, etc.", Microsoft had Apple, Be, Linux, and others, but they still held the power.
The article isn't saying that Google is abusing their monopoly, just that they do have that power.
Sure it was, but it's not illegal to have a monopoly. However, using your monopoly in one market to break into another, that's frowned upon. Google might have already been doing that with the promotion of Chrome on their site.
Also, Google's integration of Google+ in their search results pages sure is giving their own social network a leg up over sites like Facebook and Twitter [1]. Whether that legally means they're abusing their monopoly, I don't know.
[1] http://searchengineland.com/examples-google-search-plus-driv...
If the "Google monoculture" becomes a problem for average web users, they'll change. Right now, almost nobody wants to.
I switched from Google to DuckDuckGo, but I gave up after a few days. DuckDuckGo's results were very good for popular/mainstream terms, but Google is much better at deep "needle in haystack" searches.
I later switched from Google to Bing, but I gave up after one day. Bing's results were very random and stale. And Bing is ugly. :)
When was this? It's gotten a lot better for me.
One of the non-obvious consequences of this monopoly is all the other ways by which you could've navigated the Internet, that has been bought, paid for, then rapidly shut down by Google.
Note there are many other ways you can acquire information that is relevant, and timely for you -social&topical communities, Q&A sites&channels, decision trees are but a few- it just happens that search got an early start on the R&D economies of scale.
Do you think it's necessarily a bad thing when smaller companies get bought by Google? What you don't mention in the case that all startups refuse a buyout is that the #1 search product improves at a much slower rate. Their technology may be interesting and useful, but in itself not enough to draw consumers, while if it were integrated into a larger product, it could bring that new technology to many more people much more quickly. Do we gain more by using technologies as individual products than we do by using them as parts of a larger, integrated whole? Probably sometimes we do. But always?
I can't say I'm familiar with all the things you mention in your last point. But if I knew about all of them, understood their purpose and what value they served, do you think I would use them all? I feel like I would probably just type a Google search, which could potentially search all of those for me. I know social, I know Q&A - it doesn't really seem to me that with just those services, I would have a set of tools as powerful as Google itself. I use them on occasion, but for specific things. Search engines are general purpose question answerers - it seems like this is why they're more popular. I think if all of those services were out first, and then Google came along, it'd still be the most powerful and grow to be huger, because in general, it's more useful.
The writing on the wall is pretty clear - Google has a monopoly in search and the only way they can be disrupted is through alternative means of finding content (like social networks).
Which is why, as much as I like them and their products, I find the integration with Google+ downright scary and dangerous for the health of our ecosystem.
http://ejohn.org/blog/bringing-the-browser-to-the-server/
No, you're not going to match Google's crawling infrastructure or data extraction libraries. But if you just want to grab pages off the web, parse them, and handle JavaScript from those pages correctly, you can easily rig something up between Mechanize/html5lib/V8 or Nutch/Tika/Rhino.
Nevertheless, where are all the people, pundits, piemen and PR flacks that arose back when Dan Geer et al raised that monoculture issue? Whenever someone seriously raises a software monoculture as an issue, The Big Guns come out to discredit that someone, and to dismiss the issue. Where are the pundits now?
People here might not like this answer, but honestly, Facebook. Look at Google+. You can like it or not, but it's clear that it's the biggest change to Google's product in a while.
No one will make up ground on Google until a radical new algorithm is invented, and Google doesn't buy it :)
See, given one of the fundamentals in the Unix philosophical idiom is Make each program do one thing well.
In an era of Software as a Service, it is Make each service do one thing well.
Google's product is pageviews (or eyes). It sources these pageviews effectively for free (from you and I) and sells them to companies. The end-user who does the search is a marginal piece of the product that Google is selling.
Therefore you can't say Google has a monopoly on search, because there is no market for search, since no one is paying for a product called search.
edit:spelling
Google 94.3%
Yahoo 2.6%
Bing 1.8%
Yandex 0.63%
Ask 0.37%
AOL 0.23%
Here's another non-IT site with 13 million monthly visits:
Google 89.9%
Yahoo 6.4%
Bing 2.96%
Ask 0.37%
AOL 0.21%
Yandex 0.12%