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Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

The thing that's similar to what Microsoft did with IE is that Google is leveraging its monopoly position to compete in new businesses.

Search "headphones" on Google and you'll see the massive ad spot taken up by Google Shopping. They've done similar things with the way they integrate Google Local/Zagat into local business searches.

That's the equivalent of the kind of deep integration Microsoft did with IE. IE wasn't just another application in Windows, it was built-in and inseparable. The same is true of Google's products, they're automatically highlighted, and at the top of, every relevant query.

It seems pretty obviously anti-competitive to me. I think their only defense is that they claim not to be a monopoly, but no one who's on the receiving end of Google traffic can agree with that claim.

I actually think they should spin off Google Search for their own sake. To maintain the integrity and long-term quality of the product.

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> Search "headphones" on Google and you'll see the massive ad spot taken up by Google Shopping

What's wrong with that? If I'm searching for headphones, why would I want to be taken to another search engine that indexes headphones? I want to be see the best prices and be taken directly to the websites that actually sell headphones.

There's nothing inherently wrong with a monopoly. If you think Google is a monopoly, it's only because they provide the best results. Switching to a different search engine is so unbelievably easy, I don't see how you could ever claim Google's monopoly is harmful to consumers.

There's nothing wrong with it, other than that fact that you have no choice in that case but to take Google's word for it on the lowest price. Maybe there are other sites out there that do a better job finding low price headphones but you'll never see them in the search because Google prefers its own sub-standard offering instead.

There aren't. I reckon that's probably why Google offered Google Shopping in the first place - all the other price comparison sites I've tried sucked, and it's hard to come up with a suitable incentive not to suck given the SEO techniques they use.

That might be true, but it doesn't mean there won't ever be...

That line of thinking can turn any organization into an orwellian entity.

I don't feel like you've addressed my questions yet, though. Unlike in the Microsoft scenario, I don't see any significant barriers keeping a user from switching to a competing product. There are other search engines, certainly ones that don't promote other Google services. Google makes it pretty easy to download your data and leave if you want to. So doesn't the continuing success of Google as a search engine suggest that users continue to like the results being returned?

>I don't see any significant barriers keeping a user from switching to a competing product.

This is the difference, or the similarity however you look at it, between Google and Microsoft. You claim that the barriers Microsoft put up to prevent users from switching were significant, but Google's aren't. I disagree. In the literal sense no one was locked in with Windows and users were free to install other browsers or even switch to Linux or Mac.

The complaint was that Microsoft was making it difficult for the average user to do so. That's the same complaint these companies have about Google. For you it might be an easy task to download your data from Gmail or Chrome but I'm sure for the majority of users switching search engines is just as obscure as switching browsers.

Thanks for reminding me to question my assumptions and think about my perspective. I'm going to have to ask around and try to get a sense of how some of my decidedly non-technical friends and family members view Google, search engines, etc.

I'm still not quite convinced about the Microsoft/Google parallels, though. I just spend some time reviewing the history of Microsoft litigation and behaviors in this respect. While admittedly no one was literally locked in with Windows, Microsoft had a long history of establishing artificial barriers to prevent people from leaving Microsoft products while simultaneously using that position to launch new products/services and drive competitors out of business. At the risk of sounding like a Google apologist, I feel like I'm more likely to see Google make decisions that seemingly place interoperability, standards-compliance, etc. potentially above their own business needs.

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