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Comment by flexie | Hacker News Reader

Still, the real story here is that almost all small businesses depend on the mercy of one giant corporation. This Google monstrosity / police man should be split up into smaller, competing search engines.

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Frankly I think it's an inherently monopolistic industry.

In the current state of affairs (i.e. web browser interfaces and mobile phone integration), it's quite inconvenient for people to switch up their search engine regularly, or even use multiple ones regularly.

With say, supermarkets, it's pretty easy to shop at Acme one day, Trader Joes another, and Superfresh the third. Search engines aren't like this, or at least, we haven't figured out a way to use them in a way that is conducive to fast-paced, low-barrier-to-entry (or at least not astronomically expensive barrier to entry) competition. Maybe we should.

bang commands on DDG come pretty close. I use DDG as my primary search, but in reality I use about 20 different commands for specific searches on any given day, including quite a bit of google search and wolfram alpha. Not saying these commands will ever see wide use, but I find it a convenient platform for lots of different search engines.

That's a really good point. Every few months I try to adapt to using DDG as my primary search, but I always find myself throwing a !g into my searches, which kind of defeats the purpose. I'm curious, for what kind of searches do you find DDG's own search results to be good enough (or better) than Google's? What kind of searches make you bang to Google?

I generally use !g if I want local results (say, looking for a restaurant) or I use !m if I want a map (which is really the same thing as local for me). I also use Google if I know my particular search is going to be obscure and/or noisy. For instance, weird error messages get a !g. The other major exception is that Google Scholar is incomparable for finding academic papers on a particular topic. However, for everything else (general knowledge, non-weird errors, most programming-related topics) I find the DDG results entirely sufficient. In fact, I intentionally use DDG by itself if I expect to end up at Wikipedia since DDG adds possible Wikipedia matches at the top of the search results.

That being said, I end up using the DDG results for >50% of my searches. If you do more local searches, or if the things you search for tend to be noisy or obscure then, of course, YMMV.

About the same as me! I generally do DDG first unless I know I want a map, or I'm searching for error messages. Other commands I use fairly frequently are

!yt (youtube) !gmail !news !gg (google groups) !hn !boingboing !torrent !itunes !rubydoc !rubygems !codex !so (stack) !am (amazon) !jstor (and a few other specific academic journal searches, but you can also use !googlescholar) !flickr

and probably a few others! I encourage everyone to check out the list and get it into their workflow. With Alfred + DDG I can get to most things much quicker than I could through google

https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html

I don't see why its not just as easy to switch to other search engines. If Google is beating these other search engines purely because they are a better product then there is nothing monopolistic here.

The reality is that the barrier is very low. Blekko, DDG, bing, yahoo, and we can go back even farther and list more search engines. Nothing is stopping them other than their own engineering resources. Your entire argument is saying Google is better and out innovating the competitors so we should punish them.

Ever heard of Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, etc.? Google just does it better than anyone else at the moment.

Now I'm not saying Google doesn't have a de facto monopoly, but I'm wary of anyone who says a private company should be forced to split. Should they be punished for being the most popular?

Good thing google is public rather than private.

Do I need to explain how a publicly traded company is still private, or are you just being purposely obtuse?

Look at Googles multi class share structure and ask that Q again.

JHSheridan is using the term "private" to mean "not owned by the government."

Exactly. I understand there's a difference, I just thought the way I was using it was completely obvious.

I understand that Google is its own legal fiction. I don't see any inherent human rights issues in turning one piece of paper into two.

I think there could be some questions as to whether Google is engaging in anti-competitive behaviour in the way they use search revenues to undercut other competitors. Perhaps they are doing nothing wrong, perhaps they are doing something wrong, and perhaps an effective remedy to that is to split the company.

"small businesses depend on the mercy of one giant corporation" - this can't really be blamed on google. It's hardly their fault they are the best at search. If someone comes along with something better people will use that. on the interwebs there's no such thing as brand loyalty. Going forward the internet's biggest problem is security. With hackers pulling millions of credit cards from Target and seldom a day goes by without reading about some big corp getting hacked, people will more and more look to big corporations like google that can hire the best security minds for their online protection. Using google gives you some degree of trust that the sites in the results are there for a reason, people they aren't scams or bogus companies. Google is the internet's filter, and in this case with RG I am not sure that i don't side with google. There are plenty of alternatives to RG. I don't see why anyone would care much about song lyrics, but it's not like RG are the only game in town.

How would you split it up? By category? Google A can only search for words that begin with A, or are about Apples and arch-rivals (but you need to go to Google R to search for rivals) Its not like no other search engines exist.

Why do they depend on Google's mercy? What does Google provide them, that they must have and cannot be had elsewhere?

To phrase differently and hint at what I am suggesting- if Google provides something that companies cannot live without, what did companies do before there was Google?

Google provide them users.

> Why do they depend on Google's mercy?

http://readwrite.com/2010/02/11/how_google_failed_internet_m...

Google has been around since the beginning.

>what did companies do before there was Google?

They didn't.

They advertised.

Smaller companies seem to be replacing the "advertising dept." with "our rank on Google dept.", in which case it's not exactly Google's fault they are dependent on Google, any more than when a Craigslist scraper is dependent on Craigslist.

Before the search that we know of today, there were directories (see http://dmoz.org for example) where you submitted your site. Originally it was a list, then a hierarchal list, then there so many entries they let you search their database, then they crawl the web to find other sites, then they search the _content_ of other sites, so you can see how it evolved.

Web rings and pages of links to other sites were also common, basically what RG did, but more reciprocal.

Online startups comprise a small portion of all small businesses. Most small businesses do not rely on Google.

You realize the impossibility of this and this is a joke comment right?

The suggested solution may have been a joke (although it is not without precedent) but the analysis was spot-on IMHO.

Remember, Google is quite large, and hence also inhomogenous. Some time ago the Chrome browser team did something that could be construed as a service-for-links campaign, an the PageRank team penalized Chrome for two weeks (if I recall correctly - commentary on this [0]).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3422386

But in this case, we would have been worse off. It's hard to imagine that a fragmented ecosystem of smaller search engines would all reacted this quickly to a case of someone engaging in blackhat SEO, so there'd be a lot more temptation for sites to try to get away with this sort of thing.

We all depend on one search engine and will quickly abandon it when it doesn't provide the results we want. Remember Altavista? Yahoo? All those other has-beens?

Also, you can pay for advertising rather than expecting to be entitled to organic results. Nobody forces anyone to build a Google-supported business and frankly, people really shouldn't be doing that for this very reason. It's not a good idea to live at Google's mercy.

This is why your business shouldn't rely on it. I initially rely on it to get users, but then get info like email addresses, so if they ever decide to make changes in their algo and I drop rankings, I am still in business.

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