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Comment by zues | Hacker News Reader

I find it interesting to apply the same logic to other sites. Imagine for a minute if Amazon needed to feature product prices from Newegg on each Amazon search. It starts to sound a little bit ridiculous when you apply it that way. I know some will say "wait, Google is so big" but isn't Amazon too? I use Amazon in my examples but there are other good examples. Phooey..

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Note: I'm not taking any position on whether the EU regulators were correct or not. I'm not familiar with either EU antitrust law or with how Google shopping actually works.

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.

Yeah, like how amazon uses their dominance in "SHOPPING" to sell kindle fires?

*edit for clarity

No, nothing like that.

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.

An analogous situation with Amazon would be if they wrote and published their own books and started putting those at the top of all the search results.

So like they do with the Kindle Fire?

>It starts to sound a little bit ridiculous when you apply it that way.

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.

Terrible example. Amazon is a store - not a product search engine. If amazon suddenly started selling Amazon made products and putting them at the top of their listings then we'd have an accurate comparison. Google is abusing their power in one market (search) to push their products in other markets (Youtube videos, shopping results etc.).

I'm of the opinion that so long as they clearly mark that it's 'Google' shopping or flight results there is nothing wrong with the practise, it makes clear business sense and most companies would try the same. In terms of Google shopping, its a damn aggregation of other stores, presumably they get a small cut of sales via some affiliate program, but really they're in the position to do this more efficiently by directly handling people who use Google, rather than shuffling them to a 3rd party site, which would deteriorate the user experience.

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?

>> "it makes clear business sense and most companies would try the same"

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.

yep, this is particularly important since for so many people "to google" is a verb meaning to search the web, and thus if something is not found on google, it doesn't exist on the web\ (well, that's just another way to say "dominant position")

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