Here’s How Google’s New Search Results Will Look Under EU Antitrust Settlement
recode.net
recode.net
Over here, kids don't get thrown into jail because they made a bad joke on Facebook.
I also find the gamut of acceptable political positions to be much wider here. Someone with a fairly regular middle-left point of view in Europe would be considered a socialist crackpot in parts of the US. There are restrictions on what you might call "hate speach" which I appreciate. Saying you want the Nazi party back, or want to kill the Jews, or wearing a Swastika is not covered by free speach.
One thing I also like is the strong protection of customers. Decieving your customers is also never covered as free speach. There are some laws that seem silly, governing the way products are advertized. E.g. you must use metric units, if you use imperial units (mainly for screens), the metric units must be displayed more prominently, you must have certain package sizes, you have to display the price for 100g / 1kg beneath goods in shops, etc.. I never appreciated these laws until I noticed how confusing and customer-deciving pricing is in the US. Like Mac & Cheese, 20 cents a package, but in the fine print it says only if you buy 10, otherwise its 80 cents. It's a silly example, but I feel more confident in Germany that I'm not going to get screwed over by a company then elsewhere.
You go to Amazon because you want to see what Amazon is selling. When Amazon in response to that shows you products they are selling, it is hard to see how that could raise antitrust issues, no matter how big Amazon is.
You go to Google's search page because you want to search the web. Google responds by showing you the hits on the web, AND by showing you things they think you might want to buy through their shopping service. They are using one line of business to give a boost to a different line of business. That's the kind of thing that does draw antitrust scrutiny.
An analogous situation with Amazon would be, perhaps, if when you searched for books on Apache or MySQL or other server software, they also showed you deals on AWS hosting.
*edit for clarity
For one, Amazon is not that dominant in the first place (Google has 80% of the world's searches, Amazon has nowhere near 80% of e-commerce -- estimated to get to around 20% in 2016).
Second, they can't really use their (non)dominance in Shopping to sell kindle fires. At most, they can promote them to their users. Most of which haven't bought one, and wont buy one, according to number of Amazon users vs estimated Kindle Fire sales numbers.
No one complains when they manipulate search results to drop companies (e.g. rapgenius.com) in search results. So where must the line be drawn for 'unbiased' search results?
True, that's why there are regulators. If you're the clear market leader in one thing using that power to promote your other products to people at the expense of competitors is wrong. It's similar to MS with IE. They were the leading OS manufacturer and they used that power to promote their own browser.
>> No one complains when they manipulate search results to drop companies (e.g. rapgenius.com) in search results. So where must the line be drawn for 'unbiased' search results?
This was a punishment BECAUSE RG manipulated rankings. Perfectly justified in my opinion.
That's because it wasn't meant to be applied that way. Not all ideas are meant to be carried out in their extreme. For example:
― "Your french fries will taste better with salt".
― "Well, I poored 20 pounds of salt on them, and they're not tasting nice anymore".
The difference between Google and Amazon, and the logic between the different treatmeant is simple. When you visit Amazon, you visit a STORE, and you go there specifically to shop from them. Whereas when you visit Google you visit a SEARCH ENGINE, and you go there to find results about sellers and products in general.
On one hand, I use Duck Duck Go (for privacy reasons), and I've come to appreciate the seeming agnostic way in which DDG will pull results from all sorts of sources, with the goal being to provide the best experience. It isn't perfect, and sometimes it does confusing things. I just looked up "what's my IP" on DDG a few minutes ago, and it weirdly came back as a clickable thing that sent me to a map when I tried to copy paste the IP. I have no idea why I would want a freakin' map of my own IP address (I know where I am). Nonetheless, this looks a little like the DDG experience, where you get a variety of shopping options, or a variety of sources for information, and they're all first class citizens.
And, so, Google isn't exactly a walled garden, but it has become a lot less likely to refer me somewhere else if they can monetize what I'm looking for in some way.
On the final hand (I don't know how many hands I've laid out here, probably three or four, so far), these also kinda feel like ads. But, they're ads for companies that are arbitrarily chosen (by whom?). Google now has the power to select who to bless with the mighty Google hammer in these competitor spots. What will they do with that power? Will that actually make the consumer happier? I don't know how it'll play out.
I assume this isn't going to happen on the US results pages, so I guess we'll have some A/B data to compare.
The solution isn't perfect and I'm not a Google basher, but I'm glad about this. Even more important than the actual provisions of the settlement is the fact that Google - like any other big company - should know that they need to be careful how they use their dominant position in one market to try to capture a different market.
Google essentially now owns the high street in every town and city across the EU.
It's not that the consumers have no choice, it's that the companies have no choice.
And then Google were doing the equivalent of putting up their own stores IN FRONT OF existing stores. They'd just set their store up in front of competitors. And the competitors can't complain as google can, with a click of their fingers, make their store just disappear off into the Himalayas.
If there's ever a clear shut and closed case of exploitation of a monopoly and the need for government intervention, this was it. And I don't think it goes far enough.
Can any of us estimate how much damage MS did with IE and Embrace Extend Extinguish? Millions, Billions or Trillions? Would the internet technologies be 1, 2 or 5 years ahead? How much more would businesses have been productive if MS hadn't done so much damage to other software companies using their monopoly for a few billion profit? If it's even 1% more productive, we are talking trillions.
That's where we are right now with Google.
At least this time the reaction seems to have been much faster.
Nevertheless as someone who has tried to run campaigns with Google before and had to go through the hassle, this is a step in the right direction towards allowing better competition.
These competitors are extremely unlikely to be able to affect the search market.
Google has a bunch of smart people, and they knew that they weren't going to win this case -- what they were doing was blatantly against antitrust laws.
At the very least it would have been a very complicated antitrust case. I don't think anyone but Fairsearch would argue that anything was blatantly against antitrust law (and the settlement would certainly not have only involved including competitor's shopping results if it had been).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7243851
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7246436
if I'm an advertiser, how do your they decide which third party ad results must show on Google?
http://services.google.com/fh/files/blogs/google_commitments...
(in Annex 1 - Selection And Ranking Of Rival Link)
I expect from a search engine - at least a giant general-purpose search engine - that it is completely objective and honest. Only showing certain offers, or products from their affiliates, completely defeats the purpose. But if they are legally bound to fairly represent "competitors" (or products that are sold by sites that are not their affiliates), then I can use their product search without fearing that they are hiding something from me.
( In Germany: guenstiger.de and heise.de have price search engines, then I look at amazon and ebay simply because they are so large, and then at a few of the largest specific web sites, e.g. alternate.de for computers. I only trust the "regular" google search results for shopping.)
If people aren't happy with Google then they can another search engine.
"This item is not available in your country".