Hacker News Reader

Comment by TX81Z | Hacker News Reader

It’s utterly uncontroversial to state that Google search has gone to shit in the last few years.

Now, the question to ask is if Google wasn’t paying off other companies to make them the default would they have been more incentivized to make a better search experience?

At this point I don’t get any better results from Google than DuckDuckGo/Bing. A few years ago Google was better, now they are increasingly useless and no better than competitors.

If iOS users got a prompt to choose a search engine the first time they open Safari, and the order of choices was random, how many would even notice the results were different in any way?

View on HN

There are folks in my life who aren't comfortable with computers and either wouldn't know that changing the default search engine was even possible, or wouldn't feel comfortable with going into the settings because they would be afraid of breaking something.

And Google has them hook line and sinker by virtue of paying off some competitors.

Kind of doesn’t sound like much of a monopoly if you’ve got two alternatives you know and are familiar with off the top.

I think you’re missing the point about antitrust and competition. It’s about abusing your power to prevent potential competitors from competing on the merits. Paying to be a default means hardly anybody will ever see your competitors product.

If everybody was able to easily see Google’s results vs competitors it’s likely they would try harder and wouldn’t have just spent all their effort on cramming more ads above the results.

Unfortunately not trying hard isn’t illegal. Paying for placement is not illegal either, that’s pretty much what advertising is. And what Google will argue, in the case of websearch, is that the problem is hard which is what drives your perception that they have failed to maintain quality and switching is trivially easy, but no one does because.. the competition is worse. I daily drive Bing and in aggregate it’s approximately the same level of bad as google.

If you were to address the online advertising market, we would have a lot more to agree on. But you didn’t, and the article seems a bit confused about the ongoing cases (search filed in 2021 vs ads filed recently) and IMO is mostly written to rile the proles.

It is for *a judge* to decide if it is illegal or not. That’s kinda the point of a trial.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com