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Comment by rchaud | Hacker News Reader

Google.com's "clean UI" differentiator gave it a first-mover advantage compared to the average 90s search engine, but that's as far as the UI impact goes.

From 2007 onwards, Google has maintained its dominance through decidedly non-search channels: the primacy of Youtube, the Chrome browser, Android OS, and of course, paying Apple billions to make Google its default search engine.

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How do you explain that Bing has only 10% of the search market share on the desktop?

Windows has over 70% market share on the desktop. Windows comes with Edge as the default browser and Edge has Bing as the default search engine.

But Edge only has 12% of the Desktop browser market share.

It looks like 6 out of 7 windows users switch to Chrome for some reason. If not for the cleaner interface - why?

> How do you explain that Bing has only 10% of the search market share on the desktop?

It's because downloading Chrome is the first piece of advice anyone receives when setting up a new computer, Windows or Mac.

Advice from whom?

Grandchildren, nephews, nieces, etc.

Google shills, presumably.

>It looks like 6 out of 7 windows users switch to Chrome for some reason. If not for the cleaner interface - why?

They don't switch to Chrome. They're already using Chrome. And odds are, they probably have been since the early 2010s, if not earlier---long before Edge was a thing.

When they get a new computer, they install Chrome because they're already in that ecosystem: bookmarks, saved passwords, customization, Google accounts, familiarity. They won't suddenly use Edge because it has none of that.

I literally only use chrome on windows because of the cleaner interface.

Because when IE was utter garbage, Chrome had better performance, an ecosystem that included GMail, and also stored our passwords and bookmarks. Chrome also eventually allowed you to conduct google searches directly from the address bar. People use what they are comfortable with, and all the functionality built into Chrome by google is a HUGE sunk cost to bypass. The only person I know who uses Edge and Bing regularly does it to earn gift cards from Microsoft.

Also, Gmail.

People forget just how good gmail was. It wasn't just a geek status thing, although getting into the beta certainly helped, it was more that every other option was absolutely inodiated with spam, and, worse still, most had very poor tooling available for managing email in general.

Back in the dark ages when I was using Yahoo, I was receiving plenty of email, and about 80% of it was spam, switched to gmail and never had that problem again.

It was, honestly, quite an undertaking to de-google myself, because I'd been at it so long.

Gmail's #1 selling point, as I remember it, was a much more generous amount of storage, for free. I think Hotmail had like 20MB of free email storage, Gmail had one gigabyte.

Indeed, storage! I think it grew for each person you invited, too, or some scheme like that...

True, storage was also a thing, I remember using some hacked together GmailFS program, where you could split a large file among a bunch of email attachments that were sent to yourself and tagged, then you could download and reassemble those files anywhere.

I used it to store FLV music videos I found, it was... the okayest form of cloud storage.

I think it depends a lot on usage, I have a "real email" and consider my gmail address as "disposable", I use it to sign up for websites etc, whenever a form ask me to include an email address I will use my gmail address - the only time I ever log in to it is when I need to reset a password or similar.

It is full of spam.

Yes, that's a big one. Google searches are no longer anonymous now because people are mostly in a logged-in state on their browser thanks to Gmail or YouTube.

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