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Comment by throwaway67743 | Hacker News Reader

I mean, it should be a pretty easy case, Google search is objectively terrible and their other practices are extremely shady as shown repeatedly. Obviously law isn't that simple but at least the judge appears to be seeing through their behavior!

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What does "objectively" mean here?

Demonstrably terrible results for the simplest of queries, returning drive by malware as preferred results etc, there is nothing subjective about that.

Would you mind providing an example or two? I hear this often on HN, but it never happens to me (perhaps because I use Adblock?)

a query for "why does my heater take a long time to turn on" will turn up many first-page results like this one: https://candcheat.com/10-reasons-why-your-heater-fails-to-tu... which is shallow SEO content aimed at getting you to pay for a fix rather than answering the question.

I run into these kinds of pages constantly as I try to debug common household issues (HVAC, electrical, automotive, etc.)

Good example, thanks. SEO spam like this is indeed a problem. Perhaps the underlying issue is that GSearch was originally designed to "find webpages," not "answer questions."

(I'd expect that high-quality, official webpages exist for queries like "Nest Thermostat G4CVZ operating manual" or "HVAC enthusiast forum." But that's not the case for a question like yours, and SEO spammers have fooled Google to become the best result.)

Adblock doesn't hide search results, child comment gave an example but in many cases it's worse, worthless SEO crap is annoying but not quite as bad as the ones that clone genuine content to obtain higher rankings and then attempt to deliver malware...

Ok then switch to Bing, or Yahoo, or DDG, or Yandex, or…

Except their results are still sub par, which is the whole point of the case - Google has abused it's position to make competition difficult to impossible.

How exactly does Google make Bing sub-par?

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